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Site Critique: Lingerie Site Looks for the Right Mood
By Devin Comiskey
September 21, 2005

Editor's Note: ECommerce-Guide's latest critique is of a site that sells lingerie and other related products. Some images may be considered unsuitable for some viewers in a work environment. If you have any questions or concerns about viewing the site, please check with your company's HR department or your supervisor.

Shelley Riddle, owner of Set-the-Mood.com, started her online e-commerce business in November of 2002 while recovering from a motorcycle accident, unable to work outside her home. She took the site live in March of 2003, but results so far have been less than stellar. After requesting suggestions for improving her site on our Small Business Computing forums, we selected Riddle's site as our second site critique candidate.

"My first year was pretty slow, which I expected, my second year picked up a bit, and it seems this year it's slow again," Riddle tells ECommerce-Guide.com. "I get a lot more visitors, as I've learned more about SEO (search engine optimization) and getting placed higher in the search engines, and a sale here and there. But it would seem to me that for the number of visitors I should be receiving more sales. I don't currently have the budget to do paid advertising, so I've been working on getting placed higher on the search engines, mainly Google, relying heavily on quality link exchanges."

Riddle faces some difficult challenges many beginning - and even established - e-commerce business owners deal with every day. Namely standing out amongst the competition and enjoying several sales per day.

"This is not something I can walk away from - I have to make it work! Any advice you could offer would be very much appreciated," she says.

ECommerce-Guide has put together a panel of experts to evaluate and critique Set-the-Mood.com. The critique is meant as a guide for Riddle to follow on her own in making any changes to the site. The panel includes ECommerce-Guide.com Executive Editor Dan Muse, Managing Editor Devin Comiskey, regular ECG contributors Sean Michael Kerner and James Maguire, Internet marketing expert Steve DiPietro of the DiPietro Marketing Group, and Jans Carton, a Web designer and co-founder of St. Louis-based Web Sanity.

Tomorrow (Thursday, Sept. 22), we'll begin our constructive criticism of Set-the-Mood.com and get Riddle on the road to a more successful site.

We also invite our readers to provide their own feedback of our critique subject in our forums.

Devin Comiskey is the Managing Editor of ECommerce-Guide.com.

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