In this Ask Evan episode, Evan Carmichael reviews the Hocus Pocus Kidswear website, a children’s clothing store, and provides a rapid, 10‑minute audit. He highlights credibility problems such as blurry or broken images, generic navigation banners, and visible Weebly branding. He stresses the need for a concise one‑sentence value proposition that differentiates the brand, and recommends expanding the About page into a 500‑word personal story with a photo to build trust. He points out navigation inconsistencies, suggests using category‑specific, high‑quality images, and advises fixing broken pictures. For product pages, he calls for detailed, SEO‑friendly titles, URLs, and descriptions, and recommends creating individual pages per product. He notes missing or non‑clickable calls‑to‑action, social media links, and contact information, urging the addition of clear, linked CTAs. He advises removing the “Created with Weebly” footer to improve professionalism. Overall, he acknowledges the site’s decent layout and dropdown menus but emphasizes that polishing visual elements, storytelling, SEO, and credibility signals will significantly boost conversions.
Chapters
Hi, I'm Evan Carmichael. Welcome to another edition of Ask Evan. Today I'm going to answer a question from one of my newsletter readers, Jennifer, who wrote in asking me to check out her website called Hocus Pocus Kidswear. It's for children's clothing on the ground level. Go up from there, check out my site. So we're going to check out the site and see what we think. So the first thing I would do, actually even before checking the site, is I'd always try to add one sentence. If you ever want somebody to check out your website, a lot of times people won't do it. So it's great to add a sentence to explain what it is that you do. So it's great that it's children's clothing, but what makes you unique? There's a lot of companies that do children's clothing, so what's so special about you and your clothes? Anytime you're telling anybody about your, your business by email, in person, you always want to explain with one extra sentence what's so special about your company. But we'll figure that— go on to the next page. So loading up the page, uh, the first thing I noticed is that this picture is out of focus. So I don't know if it was maybe too small and then you expanded it to be bigger, but the picture is, uh, is blurry and the It doesn't make the company look, I guess, as professional as it could be because it's out of focus. Again, I'm looking on it here and I don't see one sentence to explain what it is that you do. So it's kids' wares and accessories, but again, why are you different? Maybe something in here would be nice to see. I'll click on the Home, About Us, let's see what shows up. Not a lot of detail here. Hocus Pocus is a brand new business, started in April 2012. I'd probably take that out. You usually don't see companies saying when they got started unless they got started a long time ago because that adds to their credibility. This might take away from your credibility. If somebody comes to the site and they see kind of blurry pictures and it's a brand new business, they might think twice about putting their credit card information in and making an order for some of your clothes. So I'd probably take that out. As a mother, I've designed this business to help families with our beautiful range of brand clothing, very probably brand name clothing. You're missing there, uh, reduced prices. I know how expensive children's clothing is, especially when our little angels only want to wear brand names. Okay, so this is great. Uh, this story is pretty good. What I try to do here is expand it a little bit more. I'd maybe include a picture of yourself with the kids, hopefully, uh, talk about why you wanted to start this business in more detail and explain that. I think anybody who clicks on it and reads it they might feel a connection to your story. Any parent will hopefully read your story and feel closer to you, and then feel a little bit more comfortable in making a purchase from your website. So I definitely want to expand on this a little bit more, try to get at least 500 words in here to explain your story, why you got started, what your passion is, and hopefully somebody who goes through that process will then want to make a purchase from you. Let's see what's happening next. The other thing I noticed here is that the banner is the same. So it's one, a little confusing. I'm not quite sure if I'm on the same page or not because so much of the top part of this navigation is the same from here up. But also, you want to try to keep the navigation, this banner here, different for each page. So this is About Us, you know, you want to have you or you kids or pictures, other pictures of the clothes. Um, just shake it up a little bit so it's not the exact same picture on every page, especially when this picture is, uh, is out of focus. Let's see what happens next. Let's go to boyswear. I have a son, so let's see what's happening on this page. Okay, so again, the same top navigation with this banner here. Uh, this would be a little bit of a turn-off because I have a son. I'm here on the boys page and I'm seeing girls and, you know, bathing suit for girls, girls clothing. Maybe this is for boys, but again, here, if you're looking for boys stuff, the picture should be about boys. Happy boys, pictures of the clothing, whatever it is, you should target that towards your audience. Looking at the pictures themselves, the clothes, I see we've got a broken picture here. Another broken picture here. Again, if I'm thinking of buying from you, and if I see a website that's new and the pictures are broken, I'm probably not going to give them my credit card or trust that they're going to deliver the product to me. If I want to click on one of the products, let's try Star Wars. I can't actually click on the product. I click on the picture, okay. Okay, so here there's just the exact same picture, so you're not giving me any more detail. You definitely expected that picture would be a lot bigger and hopefully you have more text here. You should describe what this is. So it says Star Wars PJ set, but I'm not quite sure what this is. Is this Darth Vader on the COVID Is this something else? I'm not really sure what it is. So you definitely want to make this picture bigger and also have some more text to explain what that is. Looking at the SEO of this page quickly, you have the title saying winter collection and the URL is winter collection. This is probably not going to get you ranked in Google. You want to have something a little bit more specific. I'd probably create a new page for each of these pieces of clothing if you can and call it Star Wars pajama set for boys, ages, whatever the ages would be for sizes 3, 4, 5. That might get somebody searching and landing on your page and wanting to make a purchase where you're probably never gonna rank for winter collection considering you're going up against some pretty big competition. So that's my immediate thoughts, I guess, on this boys page. Let's see what else you do. Let's check out the clearance stock. Probably be popular for people coming, wanna see what's immediately on sale. So Sleepytime, you're missing a quote here on the page. I click on the picture, again the same thing. So again, it's just general professional Doesn't look good. I probably wouldn't buy from this site unless I really, really had to have a specific product that you have that I couldn't find anywhere else. This here, click here to edit, looks like you're just templated stuff that these products don't exist. So you're— if you don't, if you don't have anything on here, I wouldn't have this, this show up. I'd just take it off. And if the Sleepy Time is the only thing that's on sale, then just take everything else off. What happens if I click? It just refreshes the page. Okay, so yeah, this should all be removed. Again, it doesn't add to the credibility of the page to make it look nice. Um, let's see what else we have. Parties. Hocus Pocus parties, fun, relaxed, enjoyable. So here you actually have some text, so this is good. So you're explaining, uh, you know, this process you have. You have some a little more detail, which is great. You should add more text to the other pages, which is good. Thinking about opening your own business? Ask about Party Planner Business Starter. Ask about our Party Planner Business Starter. Sounds a little weird, maybe starter kit or starter package. And you definitely want to have a link here. Anytime you have a call to action, you want to have it linked somewhere to your contact, email, phone number, whatever it is, so they can actually, you know, follow through with that. I notice here at the bottom too it says create a website with Weebly. So Weebly is a great system to create professional-looking websites without having a technical background. And overall the site has a lot of potential. It looks good. I like, I like these little leafy things. It looks professional. I like the dropdown menus. You don't have to have a lot of technical skills to work with it. Again, you could make the pictures and the descriptions look nicer, but The overall design is not bad, but this doesn't look great. I try to see if there's a way to get this removed. It doesn't look good from, again, a customer point of view. They're coming and they see that you made it as a free website. Again, they're thinking, well, if they can't afford to have a regular website, are they going to really even ship my product if I give them my credit card information? You want to make your business and your website seem as credible as possible, so I try to find a way to get that off. But the design does look pretty good, and I think there's a lot to work with from what you have here. Maybe last, last page, look at the Contact Us. So it's great, okay, so address, phone number, email, like us on Facebook. I don't see a way to click here, so again, if you want somebody to take action, you want to make sure you have that link. I don't know how— like you on Facebook, I don't see Facebook anywhere on your page. I'd have to go to Facebook and search for Hocus Pocus Kidswear, which most people probably won't do. So again, you want to make that super easy to do. And yeah, seeing that Weebly thing here again makes me second-guess the website, so try to find a way to take that off. So those are my initial thoughts. I think overall it's— it has a lot of promise. Uh, I think what you're trying to do is very good. I think if you can tell your story a little bit more and have people tune into that and read it and hopefully feel the connection to you. And I think if you can just change around the pictures, improve the quality a little bit, improve the product descriptions a little bit, look at Amazon.com, they are a great resource, you know, they are selling this kind of stuff but also everything else. See how they do it and with the reviews and all that kind of stuff, it's a good best practice to be able to follow. But I think there's a lot of potential if you do it right. So hopefully that gives you some good advice, and thanks for allowing us to use you as a guinea pig. For those of you guys watching, if you liked the video and you want to see more, please give it a thumbs up below. It makes me want to do more videos for you. And if you have a comment about HocusPocusKidsWear.com, or if you have a question for your own business or website, feel free to leave it in the comments below. I always read those, and I love seeing them come in. So thank you, and we'll see you on the next episode.
