For my third monthly review I decided to analyze and compare the websites of Manolo Blahnik and Jimmy Choo.
The Manolo Blahnik website is a clean crisp website, with a nice subtle nude background. When you first go to the site all you see are the categories you can choose from, which include: Biography, Collection, News, Where to Buy, and Contact. Clicking on the Biography link, replacing the picture on the home page the options “The Man” and “The Shoes” appears with the context continuing to the right of it and another picture further to the right. As you move down the through the categories the same channel occurs, with the exception that there are more option of shoes to look at when you get into the Collection category. Manolo Blahnik’s website shows the viewer the hierarchy of the website and is easy to navigate through both forwards and backwards, the only thing it is lacking in Steve Krug’s trunk test is there is no search bar that is seen throughout the entire website.
The other website I decided to look at was the Jimmy Choo website which is more extensive than Manolo Blahnik. It has a search bar in the upper left hand corner and the name “Jimmy Choo,” the site id is always centered at the top. There are different categories to shop under, each having their own drop down bar to choose even more specifically what is being looked for. Once you start to go further into the site, a “You are here” bar appears to show where you are, but it doesn’t match up with the path you took to get there. For instance I just chose shoes and chose boots and clicked on a boot, and the path back towards home does not take me back the way I came and was a little confusing because going back one step took me somewhere completely else. Other than the “you are here” not following the same way back as it did forward, Jimmy Choo’s website is fairly easy to use, has nice aesthetics, and a nice display of navigation for how “big” the website is.
When comparing both of the sites, the best shopping site is the Jimmy Choo site. They have a way for you to purchase the shoes right on the website without taking you to another site to order the shoes like the Manolo Blahnik website does. When it comes to navigation and how to go through the different levels of the site I like how the Manolo Blahnik website works; it’s an easy forward and backward chain that you can’t get lost in. The Jimmy Choo site confuses me with the way they have the site history set up and how you cant go back the same way you came. Overall my I think the Manolo Blahnik website worked better in navigation and the Jimmy Choo did better on a way to purchase the products on the website.