So, how does the new Woolies site look, feel and work?

From the very first glance of the homepage, there is a sense of disappointment and lost opportunity. It looks, to be blunt, pants. As much as red is their primary colour, the use of red on the site is dismal and quite depressing. There aren’t any other colours that really stand out, apart from the bright green and blues that sit atop the tabs on product pages, which don’t really blend in.

Besides the use of colours, space isn’t used well either. The homepage is dominated by a Flash section detailing the three different stores rather than promotions or price cuts; the same of which can be said of the category pages which also appear uninspired and even confusing. In fact, the big picture of a family titled ‘XBox’ on the consoles page actually lead to XBox accessories, not the console itself.

The navigation has friendly dropdown menus but they take a moment to appear which can be irritating, particularly when the anchor title appears before the menu itself and even obscures them.

The product pages are dreary in design but the information provided is quite good. Interestingly enough, the popup that appears when you add a product to your basket is unedited open source library AJAX/Javascript code because the site I’m currently redeveloping has the exact same pop-up (which I’ve redesigned because personally I think it’s a bit rubbish).

Switching sites just confuses you further. For a start, the checkout isn’t shared throughout the sites so you either have to buy your product or empty your basket before visiting another section of Woolies, which is even more bizarre considering you buy your X-Box in a different part of the site to the X-Box games. I like the funky Pick ‘n’ Mix site but again, different checkout, different product pages and so on.

Never mind that this is the resurrection of a well known and well loved family brand, this new Woolworths site has to compete with the likes of Amazon and Play.com and quite frankly Woolworths have gone into battle with a wooden sword. It’s a big shame because the new site was supposed to revive the brand aswell as provide a cover story for how a big high street brand that saw it’s demise during the recession was brought back thanks to the power of online marketing. I think with their current website, this isn’t going to happen.

My kettle is broken… no more tea….. what will I do without tea?!

I woke up this morning and through perserverance, managed to make a half-decent brew by boiling water in a pan and, as usual, logged onto the net and came across the following two replies on Twitter by a company called Stylish Goods:

@philhancox If you like any of our kettles, we can get them sent to you in super-fast time.

@philhancox See if you like any of the kettles here:- http://is.gd/tOYw and you can have a 5% discount as a twitter user.

What an example of wonderful Twittermarketing! First of all, they seem personal and not just automated replies to the keyword “kettle”. They recognised my urgency my stating kettles have a fast delivery time. Score 3 points here; 1 for recognising my Tweet in their marketing message, 2 for triggering the thought process in my mind to view their website for kettles and finally for telling me about their delivery times, all in less than 140 characters.

The second Tweet just seals the deal for me, a nice link and a 5% discount if I decide to buy. Suddenly, this company isn’t just auto-replying any more, they’re helping me out and making me valued at the same time. Unfortunately for Stylish Goods, I’m in a student crib and the maintenance form has been sent off, meaning I should get a new kettle soon. However, I will be moving out soon and I’m so impressed that I will use them to buy a kettle for my new flat.

But whilst the Twitter messages got me involved and triggered my internal purchasing decisions, the website, sadly, turned me off a bit. Clicking upon the link given took me to a page where, above the fold, all I could see was a digital scale and half a hand blender. Where are the stylish kettles? I had to scroll down to see them which in usability (and conversion) fields is a big no-no. It would have been better to send me to the search results for kettle which does just show the kettles but unfortunately neither they nor I can link to because it doesn’t generate a unique URL.

I could mention a lot more about the site that could be improved, but I may save that for another time as I will be doing in-depth website reviews on this blog in the future. I just wanted to highlight Stylish Goods as they brightened up my morning with laser-targeted but effective and friendly marketing to a guy who is skeptical to such tactics. Congratulations guys, now improve your site to really capture those conversions.

This isn’t an advert, but it is a happy coincidence that this incident occured as only last night I was chatting to @hairycornflakes about his new tool, which is in beta release at tweetdock.com. It allows you to target Twitter users based on keywords and even geographical location and send them replies automatically (although you can check the messages first to ensure they will appreciate the message and personalise it for maximum effect). You can use it for more than one Twitter account which means if you have multiple websites, this could turn into one hell of an effective marketing tool and I look forward to using it myself. I’ll blog about the results in the future, but for now, take a peek and see if it could do anything for you.