One of the marketing testing methods I use is to put myself out in the real world, away from my desk, to observe what an ad will look like when encountered out in the wild. Although I do test my digital marketing ads on different devices and browsers when sitting at my desk, it's difficult to get into the same headspace that a consumer would be in then viewing an ad or a website. This is my own interpretation of the proverbial "walk a mile in their shoes."

This is why I like writing my website reviews when I'm trave...
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This is the weekly website review edition of the Daily Golden Nugget. Each Friday, I work through these reviews to help you understand the good and bad ways a retail jewelry store website works. I look for good and bad website design, content, photography, usability, and search engine optimization in hopes that we can all learn something new.

Each week, I use Google Chrome in incognito mode to search for review candidates. Incognito mode allows me to hide potentially personalized search results ...
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Welcome to the Friday retail jewelry website review. In this week's review, I'll be searching for a random website candidate to critique in the hopes that we can all learn something useful to implement on our own websites.

To start this week's review I started searching for jewelers in Hudson, NY. Specifically, I used the Google search query "jewelers in Hudson ny."

Here's a screen shot of what the Google SERP looked like:
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Your customers expect to see something beautiful when they visit your jewelry website. Typically this means they want to see pretty pictures, and lots of them.

Speed should be one of your biggest website concerns. By now you must have heard that a visitor will spend 11 seconds, or 7 seconds, or as few as 3 seconds evaluating your website before they decide to leave or keep going. It doesn't matter if it's 11 seconds or 3; the fact is there are very few seconds before someone decides to leave and leave forever.

Don't waste those first few seconds with a blank screen because your website is slow.

Here's the deal... The internet lines outside on your telephone pole run at the same speed all over the world. When you experience a slowdown on a website it's usually because of one of these reasons:

1. your comput...
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Yesterday's Nugget was pretty long to get through, but we really needed to explain how to use Google Website Optimizer ( http://bit.ly/qEVCUP ). It is such an important tool and it's easier than Google Analytics. Although, if you are still wondering what you would want to test then today's Daily Golden Nugget is for you.

Some basic things to test with Google Website Optimizer:
1. Captions on images
2. Font size, line spacing, and font family
3. Adding or reducing white space around the site
4. Culling your content or swapping it with bullet points
5. Font and link colors, underlined or non underlined links
6. Button sizes and colors
7. Jewelry photography methods using different background other than pure white
8. Headlines
9. Repositioning your call to action message<...
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How many times have you experienced a customer looking for a diamond that said s/he first researched diamonds online? These are the people who come in asking for specific diamond characteristics without any real firsthand knowledge of diamonds.

Recently Ron Samuelson created a video that depicts the exact situation. We've included a link to his video at the bottom of this Nugget.

Unfortunately, the average consumer doesn't know any better. If a jewelry store sells diamonds, they probably have details about the 4Cs listed on their website. The customers don't learn any more than you tell them, and they naturally gravitate toward the best color, best clarity, best cut... until they see the price.

We suggest a new approach to 4Cs educational content for your website. Break each C down on a single page. Explain wh...
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