Wanted: Website Review Please review Student Books

[woopwoop]

So after having this domain in storage for a while I pulled it out about a month ago and it's now developed!

Would really appreciate your thoughts, ideas and bug (browser, css, code, design) reports.

Student Books

Idea behind the site:
1. Books searchable through Amazon's system
2. New and used prices shown for book searches
3. Search based on keyword/title, ISBN or author
4. Also select a reading list for a particular university degree course module:
* this is the ambitious part of the project and work in progress.
* to see an example select "University of Leeds" then select any subject followed by any course for an example.
5. Individual book pages offer:
* book description with title, author, publisher, date published, no. of pages
* list of similar products
* book reviews (good and bad)
6. The homepage will look for a cookie from a previous visit or request you select a country (UK, US, Canada, Japan, France or Germany)
7. Once you arrive at the local page, the language should match and there are a whole bunch of subjects listed that once selected will provide a list of books to browse based on the subject.
8. College profiles. Also work in progress but Profiles are pretty much complete for 131 UK Universities and Colleges: each with logo, description, address and other contact info plus student union contact information. In some cases the details for the campus store and student radio station is listed along with rss feeds for the college.
* About 2000 US colleges that will be added over the next few weeks
9. Student discussion forum. Basic and quiet to begin with.
10. SEO - Most pages have unique titles and descriptions but the majority of this information will be duplicate content from Amazon. Especially at the beginning. If I can add to the university reading lists database then this is a great feature for press releases and a nice USP for the site - if it's the authority as a uni reading list site.
11. Sub affiliates. Students or helpers who compile the reading lists will have their affiliate code show part of the time for them to earn commissions.
12. Affiliates can also use the Book Search Widget. Either PHP, HTML or iFrame code. Cut and paste to any website and searches from their website could result in affiliate income for the site. Also the search tool is a useful tool for many site audiences.

They come in 4 colours

My to do list / possible issues:
1. Have a proper translation done for the French, German and Japanese portals
2. Check the cookie permance fully across the site. Maybe install a geo ip check.
3. Site load time issues
4. Look at any css distortion across different platforms and browsers
5. Come up with an SEO plan!
6. The image under the search boxes (now Obama for the UK site) is clickable but needs to be rotated with other content either randomly or based on a calendar.

I've got postits everywhere so I'm sure that I'm missing stuff, but at least this post is helping me get the info together!

What do you think? Any help appreciated especially bug reports. But also any SEO or feature tips. Strengths, weaknesses, opportunities, threats and all that...

I guess one strength is that this domain has always had a small number of type ins and that a few books have been sold whilst I've been coding it the last month! Just really need to get more traffic to it...

Anyone with student sites? Why don't you install the book search widget ? :razz:

 

[rjs_essex]

In IE7 the layout is messed... It's all over the place.

Looks ok in FF V3.

Rich

 

[Jeewhizz]

I would move the regions onto subdomains. That way, you could host uk.studentbooks.com in the UK, us.studentbooks.com in the US etc, and benefit from local searches in google...

- The header doesn't do anything for me - it looks too plain
- If you haven't got the reading lists available, then don't show that University in the dropdown
- How about a breadcrumb trail ?

 

[woopwoop]

In IE7 the layout is messed... It's all over the place....

Hmmm. Thanks Rich. Hopefully it'll be one div width or something... will check it out. That's the issue when I'm on a mac with FF and most of the world uses IE. Will eventually get parallels for mac - but will look at browsershots.org.

I would move the regions onto subdomains. That way, you could host uk.studentbooks.com in the UK, us.studentbooks.com in the US etc, and benefit from local searches in google...

- The header doesn't do anything for me - it looks too plain
- If you haven't got the reading lists available, then don't show that University in the dropdown
- How about a breadcrumb trail ?

Thanks for this Jeewhiz.

I'm interested what other people think about this because the subdomain vs directory was something I was on the fence about until speaking to an SEO guy. I was pushing for subdomains but he ended up convincing me that directories are better (not just pagerank, but also for the distribution of inbounds).

The inspiration for the header was a book spine. I know... but because there was a lot of coding work - I've been exhausted with it all and decided to go for something that kinda looks professional and serious. Nothing too Jazzy. In fact most of the color on the site comes from the book images.

Am open to ideas about a new header - I've just run out of ideas.


What's a breadcrumb trail?

 

[Jeewhizz]

Breadcrumb trail is something that denotes the level of depth in the site. ON this forum it is something like:

Homepage >> forum category >> forum >> thread

 

[rjs_essex]

Breadcrumbs allow a user to retrace their steps...

At the top of acorm you can see the breadcrumbs. For this thread they are:

Domain Name Forum Acorn Domains Buy Sell Trade UK Domain Names > Domain Appraisals, Website Reviews, Domain Sales > Domain Appraisals, Website Reviews
Please review Student Books

They allow for easier navigation from one section to another withought having to go to the homepage and start from scratch or excessivly use the back button.

 

[woopwoop]

Yeah now I see. So I already have this in the student books forum, but I guess that you're meaning when the user is viewing a book they see:

Student books > Travel > Guide to Britain

which might be a good idea.

I have something similar for the Leeds, biology reading list search (although it's not clickable so isn't really the same).

I might add that to my list.

 

[woopwoop]

I guess this is the IE mess that you see Rich. I haven't slept so I'm gonna have a kip and try and fix this when I wake up... I really hate IE. Not only are those divs out of place but the text is underlined in the featured categories too. Plus the forms at the top are stretched It's got a mind of it's own.

 

[rjs_essex]

I guess this is the IE mess that you see Rich. I haven't slept so I'm gonna have a kip and try and fix this when I wake up... I really hate IE. Not only are those divs out of place but the text is underlined in the featured categories too. Plus the forms at the top are stretched It's got a mind of it's own.

Yes thats what I'm seeing...

You may want to start here: Validator

and here... CSS Validator

Rich

 

[woopwoop]

Finally got around to trying to fix the css for IE.

Still a bit buggy in IE6 (IE7 should be ok), Safari and Chrome v1 (2.x should be ok).

Still a bit of work to do tweaking the divs.

Wondered if anyone else had anything to say about the site?
Am I on the right track? Don't be afraid of saying anything positive, ahem , of course only if there's anything that you like.

Of course as many of you are my peers I respect your opinions.

 

[rjs_essex]

Looking much better in IE7

Rich

 

[julian]

i like it, and seems fine in ie7.

one thing theres no 'hand' displaying when cursor over hyperlinks on home page - as you know can sort with css.


most consumers still using ie6/7 etc - I always make sure sites look 100% in IE first then firefox second for me..thats where your customers are coming from

.. don't get sucked into the 'no one uses/i hate ie club' just becuse it formats css differently..

good work

 

[woopwoop]

Thanks Rich and Julian. I did 4 sales yesterday so I hope the momentum keeps going!

I should be able to fix the IE6 issues. Not sure about the Safari ones.
Would be great if I can find a way to make the site work for all browsers platforms.

I have [ cursor: pointer; ] in the css already and Firefox (on Mac) is displaying the hand - is it not appearing in IE7 for you Julian? Is that on any link or just particular ones - I'll recheck.

Thanks

 

[rjs_essex]

I have [ cursor: pointer; ] in the css already and Firefox (on Mac) is displaying the hand - is it not appearing in IE7 for you Julian? Is that on any link or just particular ones - I'll recheck.

I noticed this too... On the language selection page and also internally on the catagory images and text.

Rich

 

[MatthewB]

Looks awful in Google Chrome. Two of the dropdowns aren't in the green box.

 

[woopwoop]

Looks awful in Google Chrome. Two of the dropdowns aren't in the green box.

I've been making css changes recently so you might have looked in the middle of them.

Are you using a pre v2 version of chrome? If so, like I mentioned in an earlier post, it's not going to look fine in those earlier versions at the moment.

 

[retired_member25]

I like it.

How are you going to compile/source the reading lists?

I don't like how "Business" returns non-academic books, I think your Amazon keyword is too generic.

 

[woopwoop]

I should probably look through the keywords again for the homepage subjects. I dread to think what type of books are being returned from the other languages.

Am juggling so many things. Though I think I've fixed the Chrome issues (for earlier versions than v2). Just need to check if the cursor issue still exists or if the hand is appearing for other browsers.

IE6 and below is still a bit buggy.

Getting the reading lists is probably the hardest part but the coding is all ready to go. Check 'University of Leeds' where a sample has been added.


Over the next week or so I'll be emailing universities and student unions asking for help. I have an excel template that basically needs filling for each university. There's also a column for the compiler's Amazon associate tag - so they can earn commission on sales that arise from the work they do.

I think that this will also have the added effect that they may help promote the site to friends on campus. If I get a union or a student newspaper involved then maybe they'll be more proactive too. A few will hopefully display my book search widget.

I saw you have coursework.org.uk in your signature, if you wanted to include the book search widget, you can include your own amazon associate code and earn a % commission on book sales.

How it works is that after a user on your site searches they're taken to a page on my site with the results. Each result has an option to "buy" or "book info". If they click "buy" then your associate tag is used and they are taken to amazon and you'll get the full commission even if they add 5 books to their cart. If they click book info then the associate tag is reset to display the Student Books associate tag.

Your coursework site reminds me of another domain I have coursebooks.co.uk which could be developed along the same lines as studentbooks.com I guess. But maybe focused on the reading lists if I manage to compile them effectively. As you can guess it's going to be a lot of work or many partnerships to compile the lists, and they'll have to be updated every year!