Rebel Sport Website Design: Banana Peel - Ziller Web Marketing Blog

As mentioned in our previous post (see ‘Sydney-based eCommerce website designs we’d change. Part one.”), we’re on a bit of a ‘banana peel’ tirade at the moment, continuously scanning the ecommerce website designs of some well known and respected brands and offering advice on how they could improve on their website design to the benefit of their customers, as well as hinting on what we would do to improve them.

This week, we came across one of the most well known names in Australian retail: Rebel Sport.

To give you a bit of a background to Rebel Sport, their stores are enormous, they’re (probably) one of the biggest sports stores in Australia and they’ve generally got some pretty big budget advertising campaigns. I’ve personally seen everything from billboards to TV commercials and catalogue mail-outs. Unfortunately for their website, they too, treat the design as if it were a commercial catalogue.

To give you a visual, here’s their existing website design as of today’s date:

Kind of messy, right? Well, let’s get stuck into it and offer points of improvement for the Rebel Sport website design.

Dissecting the Rebel Sport website.

The website is built in asp.net, a web application framework that we’re quite accustomed to, and extremely confident in using, here at Ziller. asp.net is an advantageous framework so it’s good to see that Rebel Sport have used it to develop their online portal.

From a usability perspective, the Rebel Sport website uses a generic left navigation headed by an internal search bar. The header of the website is reserved for login information, the company’s contact details and in the top-right, is sectioned off for the shopping cart summary. It sounds pretty simple, right? So how do we critique it?

The Rebel Sport Website Navigation.

Firstly, let’s start with the navigation on the left hand side of the page. It’s bland and kind of cramped. If a vision-impaired customer was trying to navigate through the website, it’d make it quite hard for them. There is no ‘alt’ attributes to the code for the navigation, either, so it’s not accessible for screen readers – as an online retailer, this is a big mistake because you would want to make sure that your site is accessible to everyone of every background to make it easy for them to buy online.

Second, there’s a ‘sale’ button added to the very bottom of the navigation? What is this achieving, and why is it in the navigation to begin with? It goes against the flow of everything else that they’ve listed – being type of sport. We’re kind of against verically aligned navigations here at Ziller, because they deduct valuable real estate space from the home page.

Effectively, if we had control of the Rebel Sport website design, we’d create a simple, intuitive top level navigation aligned horizontally beneath the banner space at the top of the page. From here, we’d reduce the clutter and make it a drop-down navigation instead. For example, we’d have ‘shop > sports > sports type’, ‘brands > brand type’ etc.

To give you a visual, here’s a quick mockup of how we think it should look:

Stylistically, there’s not a whole lot going on. I know that the Rebel Sport colour scheme is black and white, which is fine, but they should at least put more effort into the style of the navigation, or perhaps even add some graphical elements to the page to make it look a bit more enticing.

The centre console of the website.

Moving away from the navigation, if you scroll up a bit to view the screenshot again, you’ll see why I mentioned that the content on the website makes it look a bit like one of their mail-out catalogues.

There’s so much I could write on this, but I’ll try and keep things as concise as possible. Basically, we’re looking at a textbook case of banner overkill.

Now, when I mentioned ‘perhaps even add more graphical elements’ above, I was talking about the construction of the navigation only. The content on the home page is the polar opposite. We’re looking at visual assault with banners.

I understand that as a retail store, there is a heavy emphasis on sales and getting your product seen, but this simply isn’t the way to go about it. Let’s start with some positives about the banners first.

The banner at the very bottom, “Whatever your code, we have have it” is extremely effective. It sums up why people come to sporting goods store to buy in the first place. In fact, when looking at the general design of their banners, it’s not a bad effort (if you exclude the pixelated, low quality NBA jersey banner on the right!).

The problem is that there are just too many on the page!

The home page should be a place that welcomes users, addresses their needs and guides them through the website. This should be met with a balance of text and images to give it more balance. If we got the chance to rebuild the website from scratch, we’d do away with the excessive banners completely and integrate a lot more text-based content into the design.

As a retailer, too, the online niche for sports goods is highly competitive so it’s a bit off that the Rebel Sport website hasn’t included more text on the home page for SEO purposes. In a redesign of the home page, we’d also take into close consideration the semantic structure of the website to gear it for better performance across search engines. It really is an important aspect that should be factored into the Rebel Sport website design… As a result, what they’re now missing is good home page usability and potentially good search engine rankings.

On the topic of search engine optimisation, there’s a lot of things that Rebel Sport seemed to have missed when optimising their website. For one, their meta titles are excessively long – perhaps because they’re being pulled directly from the database – and two, the product category URLs, and even the product pages, aren’t optimised very well (if at all). Perhaps this I’m moving towards a different type of banana peel now, right?

I think we better wrap this up now. The Rebel Sport website design is one that could definitely be improved upon, and we feel that we’ve certainly got the experience and know-how to get the job done. We would hope that in the future, that the Rebel Sport franchise begins to take it’s online shopping experience a little more seriously for the benefit of its customers.

What do you think of the website? Let us know!

It’s time for another Ziller banana peel, and it’s been a long time coming too! The topic this month is purely internet marketing… And more specifically, what the concept of internet marketing should be and what it is currently as practiced by fellow online marketers…

Before I get started on an epic rant that could end up longer than the Magna Carta, or the Declaration of Independence for any of our U.S friends reading this, I just want to make it clear that in no way are we beating down on the hundreds and thousands of online savvy internet marketers out there (well, maybe we are just a little bit)…

It’s just that, well… We just wish for a bit of rejuvenation… For some companies to actually breathe life into this prosperous industry, without deadening it even further.

I’m talking about the paradox of internet marketing, why it will never go away, and how we’re using the world wide web as a dumping ground for exhausted online marketing schemes.

For those of you who are new to the internet marketing paradox, it’s basically this: online marketers preach genuine and objective content, but deliver abysmal search engine fodder. It’s all archived on your favourite search engine, and will lie in wait to taint your search results when you’re looking for an answer to something.

If you think I’m nuts already… It’s cool, I’m only just getting started. The truth is, we’ve all fallen victims to our own marketing ploys…. And what’s more ironic is, we know we’re surrounded by cliche’s. So why do we keep doin’ the dirty, and dishing out Jurassic-era spin techniques in order to bait just a smaller amount of traffic to our websites? More importantly, the main point of this article, why do we use the company blog as a billboard for our products and services, or a blank canvas to be stuffed full of target keywords, instead of giving our customers something they actually want  to read?

We’ve seen it everywhere online… Some of the most prolific bloggers, some of the most iconic websites, have all aptly demonstrated their commitment to making the great internet marketing paradox even more vacuous…

It’s the “We’re different from everyone else, because we have a blog, but we spew out the exact same marketing message!” opinion. And it’s everywhere!

Blogs are great for SEO… We get it already. But let’s visit the good ‘ol internet dictionary and examine what initially constitutes a blog:

“Full name: weblog – a journal written on-line that is accessible to users of the internet.”

Ok, thanks Dictionary.com… Now, for a bit more depth to our definition of what a blog is actually supposed to do, Wikipedia says:

“Most blogs are interactive, allowing visitors to leave comments and even message each other via widgets on the blogs and it is this interactivity that distinguishes them from other static websites. Many blogs provide commentary or news on a particular subject; others function as more personal online diaries. A typical blog combines text, images, and links to other blogs, Web pages, and other media related to its topic.”

So it’s a little long-winded, but read the above carefully: “most blogs are interactive”, which would suggest that the intended purpose of a blog is for people to actually read them, right?

Epitomizing the internet marketing paradox – the internet marketing company blog!

The company blog, as of 2010, has lost its original job title of attention grabbing thought provoker, and has instead settled in the dust with the title of ‘relentless marketing tool’.

Now, without trying to sound acerbic towards the efforts of online marketers, I’m trying to illustrate some simple logic here.

If a blog is supposed to be interactive and engaging, how can it possibly captivate someone if the intention of posts is to sell or spin a product or service? It’s almost as if that because we’ve been told that blogs can be advantageous to SEO, we’ve left innovation and thought-leadership behind us to instead splurge out on some regurgitated, keyword rich content written for the search engine and not the user with the hopes of scoring a few Google points.

The end result? Nothing. If you’re lucky, you might rank moderately for one of your vague long-tail keyword targets. The cold, hard truth of the matter is that unless your blog has readership. It will do nothing for your search engine rank.

How about them apples, eh!?

This is the major pitfall of the company blog – and 90% of the time, it goes against what the company stands for! How can you preach company values of innovation, and industry leadership, when your blog is spinning keyword bait or your article is ghost-written from content already cited a million times Mashable.com or Problogger?

Work that is genuine, work that is your own, is harder to produce. But in turn, this is what can make your business unique.

Only until you put the time and effort into developing your blog’s identity, will your company‘s website reap the benefits of perpetual search engine referrals with well indexed content via a strong readership.

If you have not heard of them or shopped with them before, Big Brown Box are a relatively new online shopping website that sell a range of products online. Big Brown Box popped up almost a year ago now and most will agree that the their website is not badly designed at all. Its graphic design is done well, and the rest of the features are also well designed.

One thing we have noticed with Big Brown Box is the frequency that the website is down for maintenance. It seems that quite often this is the case, and in most cases it is for extended periods of time, on busy days. From experience weekdays, in particular those days early in the week are the most busy times for a shopping website, and in many cases these are the times when Big Brown Box is down for maintenance. As web developers we know that any website at times needs to be shut down for maintenance, but at two o’clock on a Sunday morning there is going to be a lot less traffic and is a much better time to do it then midday on a Monday.

Now it could well be the case that these frequent maintenance screens are not planned and are instead problems with the site, which even in a perfect world can happen. In this event what Big Brown Box really should be doing is offering a discount to the user – if the user is interrupted when trying to shop on your website, displaying a discount coupon on the screen they could use during their next purchase would help ensure they come back, and don’t purchase off one of your competitors.

Another thing which we noticed during these down periods was the fact that they had not paused their Google AdWords campaigns. We imagine that the Big Brown Box AdWords campaign is quite large so it would be sensible during these times to pause the campaign until the website is back up. This is good advice for any business owners running a online store, during down time ensure that any paid advertising is switched off as this can save you a great deal of money, and ensure that as little people as possible see your website off-line.

2nds World – www.2ndsworld.com.au, has been chosen for our next Banana Peel of the month. While 2nds World have not done a bad job in overall functionality of the website, it does have a very serious issue with its design. Among other things, 2nds World have chosen to use a very bright yellow as the main background colour of the site, so why is this so bad?

It is a proven scientific fact that there is much more light reflected by bright colours like yellow, and worse yet yellow is the major eye irritant which can hurt your eyes. As shown in the screen shot below, I am viewing this website with 1600 x 900 resolution and I cannot look at the screen for more then 10 seconds without needing the blink or squint my eyes. There is no way I would be prepared to spend 5 – 15 minutes on this website without a break.

A color like this type of yellow, should be used more sparingly to get attention where needed, what 2nds World have done, in my opinion is way over the top and does more damage then good.

Most often then not, it is the functionality of a website that will hurt the conversion path to sale, and while the functionality of this website is no where near perfect, it is in fact a design error that I believe is causing the most damage.

With so many websites on the Internet that could be improved we have have decided to start a new column, Banana Peel of the Month. Each month we will pick a website which we feel is doing one thing or another wrong, and write about it, providing our thoughts as to how it could be done better.

To kick off the month of June, Crust Pizza -www.crustpizza.com.au is our Banana Peel of the month.

If you have not heard of Crust Pizza before, they are a relatively new pizza shop which is doing quite well, taking on the likes of Dominos and Pizza Hut with their range of great tasting and healthy pizza’s. This week when checking out the  Crust Pizza website, there were a few things that instantly stuck out to Ziller.

When you have given up your precious time to visit the website of a pizza shop, what is the most likely thing you are looking for? The menu! Apart from maybe the store locations and the opening times, the menu is what you are usually after. Looking at the Crust Pizza homepage you will see in their prime real estate they choose to display a good few paragraphs talking about their business. While this may be interesting and worth while for a ecommerce retailer, this is not what you want here. Ziller would of instead stuck the pizza menu in the users face, maybe with a nice looking picture navigation leading you to different parts of the menu. If users want to read the about us text then they will, but we feel the homepage is not the right place for this.

Crust Pizza Menu

Second thing where we feel Crust Pizza has not done a good job, is the menu itself. If you look at the Crust Pizza menu what do you feel is lacking? Pictures! When you are viewing a pizza menu, or really any menu in fact, you want to see pictures. A nice big picture of each pizza would really help the user decide and even persuade them into a purchase much easier. Apart from the pictures the other area the Crust Pizza menu lacks in is organisation. The small anchor links at the top of the menu are not very easy at all to see, and the menu being as long as it is becomes confusing. Here Ziller would of used the full width of the content area, and better organised the categories to make the page much smaller.

As always though, you wont really know what works until you test it.

Would be really interested to recieve feedback as to your thoughts….