Ordering your kilt hose just got a little bit easier

[Deil the Yin]

Hey Matt,

I really appreciate how you and the STM are always trying to improve your products and services and hope that it will lend itself to the STM being around and profitable for a long, long time.

As a professional designer/graphic artist and one who has done information architecture for a handful of sites, I would urge in very strong terms that you not use separate URL's for various products offered by STM. Instead I would reorganise the products pages within the STM Gift Shop site for better shopping/navigation. To me, both personally and professionally, it is confusing and disconcerting when a link takes you to a completely separate web site. I know that one of the kilt vendors from X-marks does that, and my emotional reaction is very negative. This will be worse for new users/shoppers to the gift shop, and in my opinion can lead to a feeling of mistrust.

I think there were some good ideas for enhancing the shopping/navigating of the products pages, though I verily understand the technology/know-how gap (welcome to my world), and from my quick glance I really like what you did with the "ComfyKiltHose" site! Some other things you might want to look at are increasing your "search engine optimization" which will of course put the STM site closer to the top of searches for kilt products (as I'm sure you are aware), and also adding these other URL's but have them go to the STM web site? There might be some technical hurdles- I'm just brainstorming here- but anything to keep your visitors on the STM website, I strongly feel, would be most prudent. It shouldn't be too difficult to find a company that would offer SEO services on your existing sites etc, if you don't already have that...

It just occured to me, though, that if you kept the product specific sights utterly separate form the STM gift shop pages, ie no links that would take users away from STM site to such separate sites as "ComfyKiltHose" etc- the issues that I was worried about would more or less be nullified... hmmm. Well, I guess it could be a good idea after all? Or at least not a bad one?

Dang... if I hadn't already written so much I'd just delete this post. Ack. Apologies, Matt- hope I haven't caused more problems than you already had.

Best regards,
Wesley

[M. A. C. Newsome]

It just occured to me, though, that if you kept the product specific sights utterly separate form the STM gift shop pages, ie no links that would take users away from STM site to such separate sites as "ComfyKiltHose" etc- the issues that I was worried about would more or less be nullified... hmmm. Well, I guess it could be a good idea after all? Or at least not a bad one?

That's pretty much the idea, Wes, though I thank you for all your input. Absolutely we will keep all the products on the STM giftshop site, and continue to work on and improve that site. That's never going to change. And within that site, all links to product pages will remain within that same site.

The branching out to other "specialty sites" is entirely an "in addition to" thing, not an "in place of" thing. These mini-sites will be aimed at more of a target audience, and will hopefully attract more people looking for that specific thing, which (we hope!) will be of greater benefit to our museum.

[James Hood]

'Feeling an order being placed by the end of this week. Thank you for the post-offer. Hose is on the top of the shopping list, right now.