April 05, 2011

Facelift of Beaded Jewels - Think Eye-Candy

One day I was visiting my website http://www.beadedjewels.biz/ and got really frustrared because it loaded soooooooo slow. I knew if I feel this way how many other visitors feel that way too. So I made the descision to give Beaded Jewels which is the name of my website a face lift.
Before I tell you what I did to make the pages of my we site load faster, I first want to put outthere, that I have absolutely no schooling in website building, none whatso ever. I am a certified goldsmith and jewelry designer and also self proclaimed Beading Artist. That's it, I am not a website builder. What I know I tought myself and I also go by a lot by common sense. If it does not make sense...well you know, than it probably won't work.

Well when I am talking about a Face lift of  Beaded Jewels I mean of course revamping of our website http://www.beadedjewels.biz/

You can actually call it a Face lift, because that's what I really did. In my web builder WYSIWYG 7.2  which  means "What You See Is What You Get" I have the option to clone a page which is a great thing,  When you clone a page you can take everything of your original page which you want to rebuild, After you done rebuilding the page you can delete the clone. But before you publish the original you can clone that page and make it your templet page. When you erase everything from your page, you always have the clone to fall back on  too. You can select everything that in the clone page and move it back to the original page.  I smoothed out a lot of things like that , which now allows the pages to load a lot faster then before. I got rid of a lot of impurities like broken links. I eliminated a lot of stuff that were cluttering up the pages like for instance images, that really did not belong on the pages.

Having said that I took of everything that either distracted the visitor and potential customer, or  kept the page from loading faster.

One thing that took incredibly long to load was the page size itself. So I searched what the common website width should look like. I found it should be 600-800. Mine was 940 and so was the big purple Beaded Jewels Banner. So the first thing I did was I re sized my Beaded Jewels Banner down to 800.
By the way if your pages loads slower then 2 seconds it is considered slow.

Yeah I know I think thats insane as well, but see the people today are always in a hurry, instant gratification is the word of this generation. So there fore everything has to be there in an instant.

You have exactly 30 seconds to crasp a website visitors attention.
 






Instead of the purple boxes which were really dominating the pages and were kind of irritating I designed a pattern in purple but gradient into lavender and white. It looks like half round tubes in 3D. It is therefore interesting but not distracting from what I really want you to see, which is my beautiful beaded woven and wiere-wrapped  jewelry designs. As a backgroun I used white and the text colour which was black and white is now black on white, sharp crisp and easy to see and read.

You see there is a big difference in before and after and even so it was a lot of work, the dayly visitors increased 40% and so did the page views.

I like to invite you to visit my website www.beadedjewels.biz/ 

Thank you for taking the time to read it.

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