Website: http://www.divegearexpress.com/

Description: Dive Gear Express is an authorized dealer for new, first quality, genuine brand name scuba diving equipment. Their mission is to provide experienced divers worldwide with an informative, convenient, and safe business where they can buy brand name scuba diving equipment with fair prices, full warrantees, and rapid shipping.

Technologies Used: Mark from Dive Gear Express states, “We make use of the custom templates feature in ShopSite to generate our website, and make extensive use of Google Analytics to optimize our customers’ experience with the site. From GA, we recently noticed that almost 12% of our customers are visiting our website from a mobile device, particularly tablets. We made some changes to the templates to update our site design to make it more tablet friendly and are considering taking advantage of ShopSite’s recent enhancements to detect mobile browsers. The templates made it extremely easy to ripple the changes through our entire website. Making the website more tablet friendly has resulted in several positive comments from our customers and we also notice that the ecommerce conversion rate for tablet users is nearly double that of desktop users.

Approximately 40% of our orders are from outside the U.S., and we are now taking advantage of a content delivery network (CDN) to improve global performance. We are also displaying prices in multiple currencies using the dynamicconverter.com service mentioned in a previous LexiConn newsletter and on their blog.

We periodically analyze the shopping experience of our website with usertesting.com to get some inexpensive real world evaluations. Our header and home page were too cluttered so we removed some of the trustmark type logos and icons in favor of a cleaner look featuring only the most important and recognizable ones (PayPal Verified, VeriSign Trusted, and BBB Accredited) at the top of our shopping cart. This actually made our site look more ‘professional’ and drew more attention to the trust marks that remained. Our header also now includes much more prominent links to contact, shipping and returns.

Advice / Tips: Mark continued “We embed many education and product videos on our website. Although it was a bit of work, nearly all of our ShopSite pages now validate as perfect HTML5 markup. Along with making the website more accessible by removing Flash content, we also believe having clean validated html along with our improved performance has caused our Google organic search results page ranking to improve.

We have pulled back a little from the social media scripts (Facebook, Google, et al.) that seem to be so ubiquitous on websites today. After embedding them on nearly all our pages, using PageSpeed.org we learned that they were having a very detrimental impact on our site performance, especially outside the U.S.. Now the Facebook and Google +1 scripts are featured on the checkout ‘Thank You’ page rather than peppered on every page of the website. Requesting the ‘recommend us’ of social media immediately following the placement of an order (when it does not distract them from our site and when they are finished and about to leave anyway) has actually noticeably improved our rate of recommendations. We did leave a generic ‘Find Us on Facebook’ linked graphic on the home page, but it’s not a script and while it does not hurt performance, it seems almost no one actually clicks it so that may be gone soon as well.”