Some of Alan's views on this digital marketing malarkey ... there's more on: AlanCharlesworth.com

Wednesday, September 16, 2009

puzzling website (sat) navigation

I'm sure they have their reasons - it is probably related to stock categories and display in physical stores, but from this front page for Tesco.com, where do you think you would find in-car sat nav systems?
I went for 'DIY & car', but there was no sign of sat navs on that page. Now I know Tesco do sat nav systems as I have seen them in-store, so I looked for a site search facility. But there is not one on the front page [they must think their product categorization and site navigation is so good that they don't need it there - though it does appear on all subsequent pages ... go figure]. So I looked around the other product-category options and tried the only one that had any vague connections to what I was looking for - 'PC, photo & gaming', and got this page.
Again, I assume they had their reasons, but taking up around half of the above-the-fold page [and I have a fairly big screen] with a single ad strikes me as being questionable - maybe it works as a promotion, but it certainly knocks usability. This is because I didn't realise I needed to scroll down to see the full navigation bar of featured categories [which is in the middle of the page, not where you would normally expect it to be], and 'sat nav' beginning with and 's' put it at the end of the alphabetical list.


It was only at this point that I realised there was an in-site search, and used it to find the relevant pages. But I can't help thinking that Google would have found a seller of sat nav systems for me a whole lot quicker.