Out of my three final exams, I’ve taken the two hardest ones already, leaving one small one for next week. Since this is an ethics exam which I can’t revise for, I’ve finally found a bit of time to do some interesting Coffeesh0p work.

Navigation

If you’ve been on the site before now, you might have noticed the simple breadcrumb navigation at the top of each page under the search box. What we used to have was a simple list of pages all the way back up to the home page.  It helps not only with navigation, but also with search engine optimisation, linking the site together to give a much more structured feel. One problem though – it looked totally shit.

Today, I gave it a bit of a facelift:

As you can see, it now looks like it’s supposed to be there, instead of like it was tacked on as an afterthought. It also shows a drop down list containing all the subcategories for a particular category, hopefully making navigation a bit easier too as well as linking the site up more solidly.  I’ve also moved the search box to the left and brought the category jump menu up beside it to make more room. Unfortunately, it only works on the shop pages for now. I think a good potion of tomorrow will be spent applying it to the rest of the site.

Advert

I also got a bit of time this week to have a proper go on Photoshop in order to design an advert for the next edition of Wasted comic. We advertised in the first issue, but a) that advert looked worse and b) our old Photoshop guy no longer works for us, giving me the perfect opportunity to flex my skillz:

What do you think? Your criticism is more than welcome – it’s the only way I’ll learn.

Competition Winner

Oh, and before I forget, the final competition winner is Virusboy. Your pills will be shipped on Monday!

Everyone else: Don’t be too disheartened. I’ve got some more stuff to give away in the near future, I just need to decide on the most awesome way to give it away, so stick around!

Coffeesh0p has gotten bigger and bigger over the past couple of years, stocking more and more stuff. Deciding where it all goes is now more important than ever. Organising the product categories – the virtual floor plan – is increasingly important for both ease of access and intuitive shopping, as well as optimisation with the search engines. I think it’s about time for a big reshuffle!

Initially, Salvia Divinorum was the only category in the sh0p, since I made my own extract, but since then we’ve added tonnes more. The next were probably the Legal Pills and Entheogens categories. Here was the first problem – Salvia Divinorum IS an entheogen, so where the hell do I put it? Since then, I’ve always had Salvia in it’s own top-level category, as that’s always been our product of choice. The majority of visitors come looking for salvia, and the Salvia category, being a top-level category, always does well in the search engines. I’ve always been scared to move it to it’s rightful place within Entheogens in case it suddenly dropped out of the search results and I had to get another job for a bit.

But now, we sell a lot of stuff! Currently, we still have a top-level Salvia Category, along with Entheogens & Herbal Highs and Legal Pills. There are more, but these are the three I’m thinking of shuffling up a bit. When these categories first started out, I wanted to keep everything in tablets in it’s own category and anything herbal in the Entheogens & Herbal Highs category, regardless of what it was. We now stock various popular smoking mixtures, many of whom don’t list their ingredients so are arguably herbal, along with a number of entheogens, like Guarana, that I wouldn’t necessarily call a herbal high. We also have a rather out of place Snuff category, putting herbal Kanna side by side with Snow Blow herbal cocaine.

So, this has been getting at me more and more recently. Also, it might piss off some of the serious herbalists, who get personally offended to see their entheogen of choice listed as a herbal high, but that’s not all. When I started Coffeesh0p, I had no idea about SEO, keyword research or anything else in that field. I figured “hmm, herbal highs sounds like a cool category name”. It turns out, that phrase, while cool, does not get a lot of searches compared to “Legal Highs”. A big reshuffle now might result in more traffic for this search term.

So, here’s what I’ll do. Raw herbs on their own will go into a new Entheogens category, including Salvia. Anything more recreational, like Spice smoking mix, Snow Blow and all of the legal pills section will go under a new Legal Highs category. Thrilling, I know!

But here’s the fun part. I decided it would be a good time to funk up the front page somewhat. Maybe remove those massive ads in place a bit more colour for each category. Here are a couple of new banners I’ve been playing round with this afternoon.

Yes, I did painstakingly lay out all of those herbs, then separate them all again at the end.

One more tip incase you ever need to change your website architecture – make sure you correctly redirect your old URLs to the new ones. The best way I’ve found is to use 301 redirects with the .htaccess file, or make sure your categories and products “know” where they’re supposed to be, and if they get called anywhere else, they can 301 redirect themselves to the proper location. The 301 redirect tells the search engines this is a permanent relocation, and so any benefit received from links pointing to your old pages will carry over the new ones.

…For me, anyway! This quarter’s toolbar PageRank update has been a good one.

Coffeesh0p has gone from 2 to 3, with all my main categories having a PageRank of at least 1
Salvia Trip has gone from 0 to 2
A-muscaria & P-viridis have both gone from 0 to 1

For those that don’t know what PageRank is, it is one of many metrics that Google uses to rate your site, and is generally determined by the links to your site from other pages. If one page has a high PageRank itself and links out to only a few other sites, more of that “Link Juice” is going to flow down each of those links. If a page has a low, or non-existant PageRank and links to many sites, those links won’t pass as much juice. It’s these links to your site, or backlinks, as they’re known in the industry, that govern where you appear in Google’s search results. Relevent sites, with high PageRank that link back to your own site can really provide you with a boost in rankings.

Remember, PageRank is only one factor that Google uses when thinking about your site. As a general rule, pages with a higher PageRank should be more trustworthey than those without. Having little or no PageRank is a good indictor that a site is new, or doesn’t get a lot of traffic. You can see the PageRank of any site you visit by installing the Google Toolbar.