I would like a critique of this site please - especially on navigation.
I’m still not sure whether I’ve made it easy for users to see what products the company sells or to make their way around the site.
At present the home page has displays of the main products or product groups with links to the relevant pages.
The navbar on each page has a “Product List” anchor which scrolls to a list of individual products in the footer, and a “Site Map” button which goes to a page showing the company’s products, product groups and brands.
I’ve played around with other Foundry navigation stacks like Pip, Vertical Nav, Mini Nav all of which I like but so far have decided to keep it simple.
So, is this enough navigation? Can you have too many navigation options?
This is a B2B business selling to the types of companies shown on the home page. It doesn’t sell on-line. Sixty percent of visitors are on desktop, 30% on mobile and 10% on tablet.
This site looks good in terms of graphics and colors, etc., but it is a bit confusing and lightweight in terms of structure and organization. Too much white space forcing the need to scroll. There are a lot of things that I thought would be links but aren’t, so I found myself typing on phantom type. For example, there would be a header like desserts, but to actually get to the item from the top of the page I needed to scroll to the picture below, and then click only on the bottom row of the image stack type, which then opened a modal, making it impossible to save/bookmark if it were a favorite. The abundance of lists without much detail (package sizes, etc) made me wonder how anybody would place an order. Some things looked like a retail item (individually packaged) whereas as others seemed to be foodservice bulk. Maybe the opening home page could break up the product line so people can get to what they want. I’d try (might not work) consider mini-sites (subpages) by manufacturer. It looks like there aren’t many brands, so maybe put this page on the home page Our Brands | The Gourmet Merchant and make each category (loose leaf teas, salt rubs, etc) an active link to the category of that supplier. I’d also move the search to the menu bar so people can search for anything from anywhere. It looks like an interesting business, with a lot of product. Remember the buyer will fall into x categories, (for food service
for fine food retailers
for hamper and gift companies
for specialty retailers) so how do they best find what they want? If it’s organized right, adding a store later might be pretty easy. Maybe a tab under each manufacturer for Bulk vs Retail packaging? In general, I’d probably do tighter lists with each a link to a more detailed description of the product. That way people can see everything they make at a glance, and dig further into what interest them. Sorry my response is a bit all over the place. Just thinking about ways to do it.
Thanks stevec for your very thoughtful reply. You make some very helpful suggestions - just what I want.
Brilliant to have a knowledgeable outsider look at a site and see what insiders, myself included of course, can’t.