I've been promising for sometime now that I would show all of my readers the transformations that I was doing to one of my affiliate sites. A site that I desperately needed to turn around. Well, I'm happy to say that I've finally relaunched it. It's about womens denim mostly - so I understand if you guys don't care to take a look. Some mens denim available though.
Since this is Design Month I'm going to share a little about the process I went through for turning this site around.
- First off, there was just too much junk on the home page, it seemed like a good idea at the time. But then I thought to myself - I need visitors to navigate further into the site not just leave as soon as they see the home page.
- Since the site is product heavy - {remember I choose to have a whole site dedicated to this niche because it deals with my profession, and I enjoy it} - I wanted to be able to update it without opening Photoshop. Which has now been accomplished. I just copy/paste the products in the required folder, get the code, add a description and upload. That's it. No more resizing, editing etc...of images.
- I also used a little bit of php, God bless, to separate the heavily updated parts of the site like navigation, brands and the footer as server side includes. So now if I want to add a new brand, or a whole category, I just need to update one file for the changes to be reflected sitewide.
- A juicy ad spot at the top - perfect for advertising spur of the moment specials from affiliates. Again, I update one file and the banner goes on all the pages. Affordable advertising anybody?
- Non-working categories and brands got the boot, added the blogs RSS feed and del.icio.us bookmarking icon, some rounded corners, a little bit of reflection on the logo and we're good to go.
This is what it looked like before -
This is what it looks like now -
I didn't change the colors as I quite like them. Check out the site, Ethnic Denim.
So whaddya think? 
Subscribe to my full RSS feed.
Related posts:
What's Your Blog Fetish?
LiveVideo.com - A very cool video site
MadHen
designPATHS - Get your projects done
How do your feeds look in different RSS readers - A hands on review
The Challenge Experiment
I like the new design – but how are you generating traffic for this site, will it be paid or natural? Does this influence your design?
Well, the site has been live since last year. So it gets a little bit of traffic, like 300 or so a day, all via search engines. It was getting around 600- 700 at one point of time in this year. But I’m looking to increase it to at least 1,000 a day for this holiday season and more. {unique hits}
This is the third design revision I’ve done to this site and probably my last…maybe. It’s been quite a process understanding buying habits, womens search habits, navigation, just the right amount of information to show, etc… So I would say that all of these factors have influenced my design.
And yes, I will be doing some PPC as well for promotion.
I like the new look. Very sleek and clean. If I could suggest that you put a more pictures on the Women’s and Men’s selection area. While I may know all those brands (and I’m sure most people do too) its kind of lacking. I’d say even a little boring there. Once you get into a selection I think you’re good again.
Also, what is the “Resources” area for? Right now all I see is an AdSense page with your competitions link on there.
He he, my wife said the same thing. Spruce up the main women and men pages. I will be soon.
The resources will have a ton of information about most of the designers and brands you know today, plus web resources on various topics. A little history about them each. It’ll be up within a week as well. If visitors know my site for providing information, even with ads, then they’ll come back again.
Thanks for your comments.
This is a great website and I echo your wife’s sentiment!
Great job and I look forward to checking it out more once I loose a few pounds!
i really like the new sleek design!
Personally, i don’t like that fact that the homepage had no products on it. But that’s just me. Also, i believe it might be bad for search engines, that’s if you want to optimize it for a couple of strings. If you’re only focusing on the internal pages, that won’t mind.
As for the products pages, more pictures of those jeans are needed: front, behind, side.
That’s it