Site Analysis

What’s wrong with this Web site?

Bi-Rite Market is something of an institution in San Francisco. A grocery store with a huge and faithful following, it doesn’t see itself as just a grocery store. People actually line up on the street to get inside. The fire department had to be called in once because of overcrowding. The reviews for the store on Yelp are overwhelmingly positive. The homepage on the store’s Web site proclaims, “Bi-Rite is a neighborhood market, feeding our community with love, passion integrity.”

Sam Mogannam, who owns both the market and a nearby creamery, wanted his Web sites to capture the spirit of his stores. “We wanted the experience of logging on to biritemarket.com and biritecreamery.com to be as similar to the experience of walking through the door of our market and creamery as we could,” Mr. Mogannam said. “This meant showing the bounty of the produce, prepared foods, and delicious grocery products we offer, for that wow feeling of surprise our guests have each time they come to the market.”

That said, Mr. Mogannam decided not to create an e-commerce site — although he does offer gift certificates online. “The goals of our sites are to build brand, strengthen our community, and convey important information about our stores that our guests are looking for, from contact info to catering offerings,” he said. “Throughout the planning of our site, we tried to pay attention to having the most important info — our address, phone, menu — in immediately findable spots.”

Although the market has been around since the 1940s, its first Web site wasn’t introduced until 2003. Last year, Mr. Mogannam invested $18,000 in a redesign, hoping to solve problems with both the site’s design and its back-end administration. “We’d had a site for several years but it was static and difficult to update,” he said. “Making our site more dynamic was the No. 1 priority in creating a new biritemarket.com.”

The other priority was giving the site a look and feel that would reproduce, as much as possible, an actual visit to the market. “We wanted the experience of logging on to biritemarket.com to be similar to the experience of walking through the door of our market,” Mr. Mogannam said. “This meant showing the bounty of the produce, prepared foods, and delicious grocery products we offer, for that wow feeling of surprise our guests have each time they come to the market.”

Clearly, the redesign has paid off. “We’ve seen a great increase in Web traffic since launching our new sites — for example, about 9,000 visitors per month in the months preceding the new biritemarket.com site to 17,000 average visitors per month in recent months, one year after the new site was built,” he said. “The site has possibly been most incremental for our catering business, as it offers lots of sample menus and is easily updated as seasonal catering offerings change. We haven’t done quantifiable mining into how the improved site has changed business otherwise, but our market’s sales are up 20 percent over last year and we’ve had the new biritemarket.com site for one year, so that’s a good sign.”

When the redesigned site was ready, Bi-Rite used a variety of social media channels — including Twitter (more than 6,000 followers) and Facebook (more than 2,300 “likes”) — to get the word out. “We sent Twitter and Facebook posts, as well as an e-mail to our list of 3,000 to 4,000 contacts, announcing the new site and its most exciting features,” Mr. Mogannam said. “We also created ads for a few local publications and postcards to hand out on the store floor driving people to our blog, which we saw as the biggest newsworthy component of our new site.”

Most of Bi-Rite’s search engine optimization efforts have focused on creating useful and relevant content. The home page gives substantial real estate to the blog, which discusses food, recipes and other information of interest to Bi-Rite’s customers. “Useful content is ultimately going to be what brings people to the site in the long term,” Mr. Mogannam said. “We then hope that people tell their friends about the site and share it online. If we do our jobs and people like the site enough to tell their friends, it helps our Google ranking too.”

I frequently discuss the importance of paying attention to site analytics, and Mr. Mogannam appears to be doing just that. “We use Google analytics to measure traffic to our sites once a month,” he said. “They’ve taught us what pages are most often visited — catering and sandwich menus are usually highest after the homepage. They’ve also taught us what blog posts are read most. We’re always interested to see how Web traffic is affected by our coverage in the media.”

So what is Mr. Mogannam hoping for out of this critique? “Feedback on what’s working, what isn’t so we can make changes!” he said.

Please take a look at the site and social media efforts and consider a few questions:

• Does the site provide the kind of information that creates a positive brand image?
• Does it create a sense of trust?
• What do you think of how the company is using social media?
• What can Bi-Rite do to improve its standing in search engine results?
• Do you agree with the decision not to use the site as an e-commerce platform?
• Do you have specific suggestions about the design, navigation or marketing?
• If you have never been to Bi-Rite, does its site make you want to go?

Next week, in our follow-up, we’ll collect highlights from your comments, and I’ll offer some of my own impressions. And of course, we’ll get Mr. Mogannam’s response, as well.

Would you like to have your business’s Web site or mobile app reviewed? This is an opportunity for companies looking for an honest (and free) appraisal of their online presence and marketing efforts.

To be considered, please tell me about your experiences — why you started your site, what works, what doesn’t and why you would like to have the site reviewed — in an e-mail to youretheboss@bluefountainmedia.com.

Gabriel Shaoolian is the founder and chief executive of Blue Fountain Media, a Web design, development and marketing company based in New York.

Article source: http://feeds.nytimes.com/click.phdo?i=7fc5a57e100f402498471ee117262f1a