Site content & design: Rawshoe.co.uk

Hello again! I hope you enjoyed my last (rather frustrated) attempt to be constructively critical of Schuh.com’s website.

Strangely enough, I’m about to embark on yet another critique of a shoe retailer’s online presence. I should point out that I’m not solely fixated on shoes or anything - it’s just that I was utterly desperate to find some replacement old-style Dekline ‘Villain’ trainers…which I eventually found on Raw’s website. And their site is, unfortunately for them, the subject of today’s post.

A critique of www.rawshoe.co.uk

I must say that, to all intents and purposes, nothing good seems to have happened to Raw’s website. This is a pity, since the high street brand is quite strong: Known for being on the pulse with regard to fashion, having generically good-looking shop assistants, and playing music in-store that has swearwords in. Because they’re a cool company. And because that’s what their clientele expect - who’re also cool.

Well, this website does not support that image. It’s the equivalent of the uncool kid in class who smells a bit stale and collects pencils.

General issues

So, to start from the beginning, the Information Architecture (IA) element of this site doesn’t do too badly. Once you’ve found the tiny left-hand navigation menu, searching by brand, type or colour is relatively easy and drops the user into a fairly obvious selection of results. The problems here are:

• As an introduction to a brand that Raw sell, that page is a bad representation
• It’s not obvious where the action points are. What’s clickable? Where does it take me?
• The page is quite obviously a dump from a database entry: all the information is there, but it’s incredibly badly organised. Three currencies (US, UK, EU), but only one size type (US), a pointless ‘country’ field (presumably where they were made?)…
• The photography is appalling quality
• Brand specific pages DO exist in the site structure, presumably as a result of a now-defunct sitemap - but instead of a 301 redirect to the brand’s page in the site, it just tells people that the site’s been updated and to do it themselves. Quality!
• The brand-specific pages are unhelpfully located in the site structure, apparently titled something along the lines of http://www.rawshoe.co.uk/mall/Shoe_Details.asp?Stock_ID=4371, which helps neither man nor search engine

If you want to buy, you click on the basket icon and get this page. Another page completely lacking in … well anything! Yes, the smiley faces provide an obvious indication of whether there’re any particular sizes in stock or not…but that’s about the only positive. It will even let you add items that are out of stock to your basket!

Content

From a content perspective, this site doesn’t do as well as it could. There are a number of issues that need addressing

• http://www.rawshoe.co.uk/Brand_Store.htm : bizarre column based, user-unfriendly page with content that drops off the page, making it unreadable
• In fact, there’s not much useful search-friendly copy on this site overall. Most of the searchable text is the company info, or T&Cs - which are fine, but there’s no shoe info! It’s a shoe store for crying out loud! It’s begging for some good copy writers to get their hands on some brand literature and shout loud about these products
• The whole thing is built in awkward tables and frames, which are no good for accessibility and can hamper search engine’s crawling of content. Not that it matters, since there’s no content in there anyway
• The homepage is an absolute bombsite of poorly-optimised messages, priorities and functionality - which leads me finally onto…

Design

Dear God: will someone please help this site! Blank white? No background? NO VISUAL ELEMENTS AT ALL!? Oh, the humanity!

Customer service

Because I was so desperate for those trainers I mentioned earlier, I bought them from this site. “Bargain”, I thought, “Can’t go wrong for £18″. Well you can.

• Remember how I mentioned that the smiley face stock indicators were the only good things about this site? It seems that they don’t work
• Remember how I mentioned that you can add items that are out of stock? It seems you can also PAY for items that are out of stock

Come on Raw, sort it out.

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  The Boston E-Party is a blog written by George Rosier about web design, usability and anything else that takes his fancy

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