Please tell me what you think

General Discussion
1

Hi. I have a business called Oh So British. I had a grand idea a couple of years ago where I would bring a bit of Britain to France for all of us who live here - namely decoration and gifts…so a little bit of home, a little bit of British! The initial idea was to sell principally through my website and support the business through local sales in Ile de France, where we live. All is going well, and I find that our French cousins are equally enthusiastic, although I find most of my sales are coming through fairly locally with repeat business from my network of customers here. The website is used for repeat business and is hit on by many others on the www, but who do not place orders…HERE’S THE CRUNCH… Could I ask you out there to have a look at my website and tell me what you think (try to be kind!). I would really appreciate your first impressions, the positives and the negatives and whether the site looks ‘trustworthy’. That would be a HUGE help and I look forward to lots of feedback PLEASE. Thanks. www.oh-so-british.com

2

Hope you won’t be offended when I say that, in my opinion, most goods seem over priced.

3

Claire, just reading up on this, give me a shout if you need help with the translation, I am a Language Teacher.

4

I found your site very nice, in terms of colour and design. However, the home page gives the impression of a blog not a shop … My suggestion would be to put the text below the images. Attract the customers to click and buy. If they want to find out about you, they click on about us! Why not have a button saying ‘latest products’ ?

In terms of languages, I agree that mixing both languages on the same page is not so good (and watch out for the mistakes: quel été) . You might be better creating 2 sites with flags to choose the language on entry. It’s more work but who are your buyers? French people or Brits in France or both?

Also about SEO, can you give proper names to your pages? www…/page6.htm is not interesting for Google.

Keep going, it takes time to get known but I find your range of products very nice.

5

Hello Claire

Great idea and the products available are lovely. It looks really good and I found it friendly and inviting to browse through. My only concern was the size of the pictures, when I am looking for gifts or products for the house my first point of call is visual, if I like the look of the item I will then look at the discription and price. On your site the wording for me was more prominent than the picture of the item.

Great site will be taking another look to see what I can get for Christmas.

Good luck
Michelle

6

Claire, how brave. I do like the idea and I guess it is always going to be a struggle with the French and their protectionism however, I do think that the younger generations are coming around more. I would encourage you to use both French and English, as already mentioned by a few, especially in your ‘Terms & conditions’ furthermore, why not add a little reflection connected to the English culture?? Of course, I understand it’s a question of cash however the pics could be bigger /and more choice of items would be good as well.

Hope that helps and the best of luck.

7

Hello Claire,

I looked at your website and I loved some of your gifts . I will probably use your mail order service because I live in South West France .
I am looking for a typically English gift ( around Christmas time) for one of my elderly Spanish students ! Have spotted several ideas !
By the way,I wasn’t able to register using my email address, the site rejected it . Any idea why ?
Thanks .

8

Have never seen your website before and I didn’t know it was there. You have some very nice stuff the sort of thing I would like to own and may well buy as Chrstmas presents later in the year . I agree a newsletter or some sort of sign up for special offers would encourage me to return and to “stick”. Good luck

9

I suppose I was looking for names that I recognised or because of the name,more stuff with union jacks on

If you were to separate the languages, you could perhaps orientate the English site to have a " gifts just like you’d find at home" approach/feel and then have more “obvious” things on the French site like union jack tea-towels or Willn’Kate shaped tea pots

10

A couple of thoughts

1)For a site called “Oh So British” it doesn’t look very British and not many of the products strike me as being typically Brit

2)Some pages are in English only, others are in French as well. This isn’t very consistent and probably not good for SEO reasons as the page header identifies the page as being in English. You might be better having completely separate pages or even separate sites.

  1. Personally I find the text a bit small

Steve

11

Hi Claire
Lovely looking website by the way!! Love the name, the colours and the feel.
I have struggled with the same problem that I get quite a few visits to my site, but then people don’t click through to where I want them to go so I have been working hard researching what to do about the ergonomics of it all. (www.greenstaysinfrance.co.uk)
Here are a couple of things I think you could do according to what I have learned:

  1. You need “calls to action” in the top right hand side - eg email sign up, browse shop etc and don’t just rely on people seeing your menu items and clicking on the - they don’t !

  2. you need to have the important info ABOVE THE FOLD - some of yours gets a bit lost down below

  3. Optimise for longtail keywords so that the people visiting are more likely to be interested in your products.
    …but also you should know that on some of the very top travel sites (the stats that I know about)the conversion rate (ie those that buy out of those who visit) is often only about 2% so don’t get too disheartened

Good luck!
Kate