Case Study

Review Brief

Website: bobsflagpole.com

• Your homepage is in fact a catalog page that displays and offers lots of products. This is not a good idea, because... (a) it's extremely overloaded, (b) it slows down the page, and (c) it requires long scrolling on mobiles.
• I checked the page's speed with Google. It received a score of only 30/100, which means that it's VERY slow.
• It's perfectly fine to display a few featured products, or a selection of products on sale, or a selection of "most popular" products. But please keep in mind that the homepage's main objective is to draw attention and keep new visitors on the website. It should not be just another product catalog page. The homepage must also include a short introduction, telling new visitors who you are, why it was a good decision to land here and what are your most important advantages over the competition. There are enough inner pages to take care of the sales process.
• Let's have a look from top. On desktops, the "welcome to..." strip is useless and wastes valuable space. The "welcome to" can be a good title for an opening text, but definitely not a strip above the logo and navigation.
• The logo takes up too much space on desktops. Also, you can take off the search box. In-site search boxes used to be a nice gimmick many years ago. These days well structured websites don't need search boxes. Moreover, people who use these features without clear search guidelines may leave your website frustrated.
• The navigation menu must be improved because it's pretty messy. On desktops, the menu starts with "about us". This is not a good idea. Users never read about a company before reading first about its offers. The same with "customer care". Why would anyone see this link before browsing first your offers? Yet the worst part is the fact that your products navigation is separated from the main menu. This can be extremely confusing.
• On mobiles, the categories come first, but without mentioning that the 4 links belong to the categories section. What you need to do is to display a "flag poles categories" and use a dropdown menu with the 4 categories.
• The logic flow of the navigation menu is very important. For example, start with the products presentation (categories), then products support topics (like FAQ, flagpole care, flagpole uses, how to choose, etc), then customer service and contact, and end with the technical related issues like policy, terms, etc.
• Below the menu you're wasting valuable space for some kind of... announcements. First of all, you don't have to instruct mobile users what to do because mobile users will automatically land on the mobile version. They won't see this line. Secondly, that's not the place to talk about shipping or tax. Thirdly, these lines use different font sizes and styles, which is bad design practice and make a very bad impression.
• Websites today use large visuals on top of the web pages. These visuals are usually high quality and relevant images, with powerful headlines over them. It will be a very good idea to add such visuals to your website.

These are just a few preliminary comments. A detailed report has been created for the business owner.

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