Site of the Week – Bed, Bath & Beyond
Bed Bath & Beyond is the lone home goods retailer since Linen’s and Thing’s folded a while back. They have a great selection of products, sometimes at fantastic prices. I’ve always thought the stores were a bit crowded in an old fashioned hardware store kind of way. Not that this is a bad thing. Just an observation.
Their Web Site somewhat reminds me of the stores. Crowded, lots of messages and stimulus. Here are my thoughts.
Overview
Overall the basic navigation is good. Things are where you would expect them to be.
- Left Product Navigation
- Nice Big Search.
- Key Seasonal Menu up Top.
- Featured Section in the Middle. Though I’d like to see a little more interactivity in this space if they are going to squeeze this many products into it.
Suggested Improvements
- After many minutes of playing, I’m still not sure what “Turn Menu’s On/Off” does.
- Free shipping is sort of squeezed in there at the top It could be better located, expecially if it is a big conversion factor.
- The dark blue bands as a design element make the search bar look crowded.
- There is no white space on this page at all. The secondary feature items look squashed in and nothing stands out.
- Not putting the footer links like customer service and help in the footer makes them hoard to find. In fact I’d prefer to see the help button in the upper right hand corner where consumers are used to looking for it.
- After this section everything just starts to just get plain messy. Nothing catches your eye here.
I fully understand the challenges of having multiple departments pushing to be on the home page. At AT&T we had over 200 web sites all wanting to be featured. With an updated design, secondary landing pages and some agreed upon publishing calendars BedBathandBeyond.com could look better, and be easier for consumers to use.
What do you think?
