Small Store Web Site Survey

One way of getting a handle on the state-of-the-art in small-store Web sites is to take a look at a bunch of them and see how things are at the present time. To do that, I took a look at 50 musical instrument retail store Web sites. I kept this to small stores, and this meant that I did not include giants like Guitar Center or other major players.

I was also interested in looking at how retail stores use the Web, because that was the audience for this program. For that reason, I eliminated Web-only operations. If there was no ongoing physical retail operation, we didn't evaluate the sites.

I began by looking at the most important single metric in Web-site performance -- load speed. In general, a good site loads for a first-time user on a dial-up connection in 10 seconds or less. Only 8 of our 50 sites met that criterion. In fact, more than half (26) took more than 20 seconds to load. Those sites over 10 seconds, and especially those over 20 seconds, are running a severe risk of losing users showing up on a dial-up connection. They simply won't wait for the site to load.

Overall, the very slow sites pull the average way up, and the average musical instrument Web site in our survey took 28.4 seconds to load up.

Metatags are one of the most important ways that you can help search engines index your site and display information about your site that leads people to click through to it. Thirty-nine of our 50 sites used metatags in some fashion. That would seem like good news, but it's also true that only 1 out of the 50 sites made full use of the metatag and title tag capabilities.

Twelve percent of the sites used frames. This is usually a negative because frames offer significant problems for users both in bookmarking and printing pages.

When we applied the print test that we look at to see if people can print things easily, 26 of our 50 sites did okay. "Okay," in this case, means that those sites could be printed out easily by a visitor who simply hit the browser's print command.

Eighty-two percent of our sites (41) gave the store location. That means that 9 out of 50 sites did not think it was important to tell visitors where their physical store was located. Only 20 sites told visitors what their hours were.

Let's think about that for a moment. Even on the sites who included location and directions, visitors would be forced to call the store or check a yellow-page ad in order to find out what the hours were.

Site-specific search engines are one of the most powerful tools you can have on your site. I strongly recommend that you put one on your site, because 70% of the visitors to sites that have them use that search engine as their first act. Only 9 of our 50 sites (18%) had a site-specific search engine.

Now, what about e-commerce? You would think that after several years of Net activity, we'd see quite a lot of e-commerce. At least that's what I expected. Instead, only 13 sites (26%) had some kind of e-commerce capability. This means that only about a quarter of the sites could take orders for anything.

So, what's our overview? The small musical instrument retail stores in our sample are generally not making the best use of the technology. Only about a quarter are actually selling anything online. Even for those who aren't selling online, there are stores that don't include basic information, such as location and hours.

In addition, a significant numbers of stores are not using the technology in a way to get anything like maximum benefit. Load speeds are simply too slow. Too many sites cannot be printed easily by a visitor. Hardly any sites have got a site-specific search engine.

Let's move ahead and look at three specific areas of site design and management that you should be paying attention to in the next year. Weâll begin with E-commerce Packages and Portals.

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