October 1, 2007

Please, pretty please, do not read this post in the wrong way.

So, yeh, um… wedding dresses.

Actually to be honest isn’t that a really beautiful dress in that picture up there? I was looking at this wedding dress site called The Bridal Shop and trying to pick my favourite (thats it ^) but it took a while.

The designer of this dress is called Forever Yours and they obviously have their head screwed on straight. I don’t like many of the offerings put out by designers nowadays. Some of them make you want to throw up. I used to think “well, lucky me, normal women aren’t like that.” But now having attended enough weddings where you feel so sorry for the guy my fears have been growing majorly. I have maybe a grand total of one dress that I have seen and liked at a wedding. God bless the husband to be on that day for kicking her ass before the wedding about make-up.

Anyway back to the website. You can see why girls go crazy looking at these things! The women look really nice sometimes and horrible the other times but either way they are fun to look at!

Anyway, a couple of things need to be said.

1. Strapless : good trend.

2. Bodice : not too much detail.

3. Lace : if they have to, but please keep to minimum.

4. Colour : Women, please. If you think a guy grows up thinking a woman is going to wear a champagne dress down the aisle think again. We want white.

5. Make-up. MINIMISE.

Deal Locker is a deals and coupon blog that warms my heart because they have a specific section for coupons Australia.

I’ll tell you what if I was home right now I would have used their coupon code for Dominoes Pizza… (did you know that you can now order Pizza through the internet? It’s true!) They’re offering 5 brownies with the meal for an extra $3. Who knows how big the brownies are.

As a coupon codes website it’s fairly stock standard. It’s a shame that sometimes when you click on to a listing for say, Dell, and the engine has listed it with 17 coupons. But when you click through to it there’s no listing you feel a bit of disappointment.

It’s also got the dreaded tag cloud… But a positive is a user rating system to vote the coupons up and down, and also to validate coupons as they are used. This is good.

They’re off to a basic start and with improvement could become strong. I’d just love to see a little something that makes it completely unique.

Discount Flooring.com is, at flirst glance, exploring the DIY niche by selling all sorts of flooring online…. It’s a nice site that has an ok design and lots of different types of flooring available.

If you can think of the flooring type, they are selling it. Wood, tile, stone, vinyl floor, ceramic… whatever.

But when I say selling it … what exactly do I mean?

The first thing about this site that made me ask questions was the Google Adsense ads. What the? If you’re trying to sell a product you’d think the last thing someone would be doing is try to re-direct you away for 1, 2, 5c a click.

Turns out that they aren’t selling floor, but they re-direct you to other sales pages - mostly with website FastFloors.com .

The thing is, DiscountFlooring is a nice site and it showcases flooring so well that it’s hard to believe that someone would expend so much time building an affiliate website. It’s also hard to imagine their being much money for affiliates in this niche but maybe I’m wrong.

They have definitely got some pricing that LOOKS solid. Although I would be clueless when it comes to before and after pricing.

Knowing that the site is an affiliate floor website - nothing wrong with that if they bring the products together nicely, which they have done - they have given themselves a good post by creating a service locator section on the site as well. This is for US residents only and helps you locate tradesmen to install the brand new flooring in the house once its been bought.

As a portal it’s a cool idea and a cool site but I think Discount Flooring could do a better job by presenting themselves as what they actually are! Then again, I know website developing… other potential customers maybe wouldn’t even think twice about the Adsense or being carried to a different site.