Launching My First Magento Site – WalkingCanes.com
by TJ
We have been experimenting and toying with the open source shopping cart platform Magento Commerce for some time. If you read this blog, you’ll see the issues that we have encountered while testing the system. However, we have decided to give it a full production run and have just completed our first Magento shopping cart. We just unveiled the new design for Walking Canes this week and would like to know what you think.
We didn’t want to go too wild with our first attempt at it, so the template is fairly simple. However, that is what Walking Canes’ market calls for so it worked out great! The site has the premium domain name for this market and was ranked on the first page on Google for the main industry keyword of “walking canes”. However, the site ranked poorly for just about all long tail keywords. We have moved them up to the top fold on Google with the new design launch and hopefully they begin to see some longtail traffic very soon.
Look at the site and post what you think.
Looks very clear, simple, and easy to navigate. I especially like the wood grain background.
For anyone interested in walking sticks or canes, your site is the bomb.
hi, i found your site when i was looking for info about magento as a ecom platform. how do did u get such a premium .com for walking canes. u r so lucky!
anyways, here are some things that i noticed.
1) when i first land on your page, i didnt get the impression that i was at a walking cane site. i see a long note, maybe too long for someone with my short attention span. then after i scroll down a bit, i realize oh ok the site is selling walking canes. maybe best to have a pic of a walking cane and a short call to action (i.e. 40% off walking canes)
2) also, u may want to change some of the duplicate urls. https://www.walkingcanes.com at your logo, http://walkingcanes.com, http://www.walkingcanes.com. all three of these pages will be considered different to google. solution would be to use some 301 redirects.
3) site loaded a bit slow for me. im using broadband. perhaps there are some hosting optimization that u could implement (i.e. caching) or just go with a magento focused hosting provider like crucial
4) navigation is very clear and concise
5) wooden background is a nice touch
overall a very nicely done site with a super premium domain. man, if u ever decide to put this baby up for sale let me know. im going to continue reading the rest of your blog.
Edward,
I appreciate the comments and you make some good points. Magento itself is a little slow and speeding it up is something I’m looking to do. I appreciate you commenting on the blog, but the follow up spam comments that I deleted were unnecessary.
The domain is the clients, so I’m not too lucky