It is very important to look at the competitors of highnoonholsters to be able understand the most important element of the sites are. This will allow us to understand what can be removed from the site and what needs to be updated. There are many competitors within thew market of gun holsters so it is important to stand out from the crowd. This shouldn’t be hard as the majority of the other designs are just as poor as the one that we have to redesign. The biggest competitor in terms of competition within the market and design is the Blackhawk site. It is complete with full width images with overlapping pictures of guns on the welcome page;
Action photos of soldiers with bold white text to make things stand out more. The navigation tackles the problems covered in the book “######” with drop down menus by creating a large box below the menu that contains all the links;
It is clear, simple and easy to use, regardless of the fact there is a huge amount of content on there.
Patrol Store seems very busy with a lot of content, there are banners advertising products, smaller adverts that link to an external site.
There seems to be a lot unnecessary information on this site that will only confuse the user. The menu is also confusing, while I was looking for the holster tab I couldn’t seem to find it and if you look as well, you will find it is difficult to navigate. Eventually when I did find the gun holster section there were only 16 to choose from. While this limited amount holsters available for sale on the site are shown in a simple grid, they still seem cluttered.
Simply Rugged lacks a professional look that allows the user to trust it with its payment details. When you land on the site, you are greeted with plain welcome page that doesn’t particularly make to you want to stay on the site.
The store is simple in the sense that the menu makes it easy to choose between the different things you can buy, but at the same time the images are very low quality sometimes with a description. This is awful, and am not encouraged to click on any of the links. From looking though these sites, I have realised something that I hadn’t planned in my planner is e-commerce design, so I am going to make a note to cover that next.
Uncle Mike has a great site, it is simple, clean and encouraging to use. It has two colours, grey for the text and green from the logo for the buttons and links. I think the simplicity of the site works in it’s favour.
Alien Gear is a very cheese website with alien faces and flying sauces, takes away from the professional purpose of the site, to sell gun holsters. How are the two related? There may be a small demographic of americans who own guns that also believe in aliens, but seems a strange way do business to single out your audience and effectively cut the others out of your business’s target audience. This site has even less options available than Simply Rugged’s with only four holsters available for purchase.
De Santus Gunhide seems very outdated by using old skeuomorphic design which takes cues from a real object and makes them into digital design. That said though it also seems to have used the colours of the american flag which helps sell the company as a patriotic experience and will encourage people to buy from the site ‘for their country’. That said, the store is reasonably good, splitting the items into categories then allowing you to go into those categories.
The Holster Store seems very backdated to the early days of the internet with the simple sidebar containing many text links. That said, 30 seconds while writing this past sentence, I received an instant message on the site asking me if I needed any help, just like a shop assistant would if I walked into a store.
This site has a huge collection of different holsters available for sale. These two facts help make the site better than it originally seemed, customer support is something important that I read in Nathalie Nahai’s “Webs of Influence”.
Galco Gun Leather is a website that works really well with flat colour, images and minimal text, the store looks like any other. It is simple and professional enough to be trusted with your money, but nothing special in the sense it doesn’t stand out from the crowd.
Crossbreed Holsters has a nice mixture of texture and flat colour to look professional, it is accessible and easy to navigate with a well laid out shop, with 60% of the products with discount, this relates to the sales techniques mentioned in Nathalie Nahai’s “Webs of Influence”.
The bright green of sticky holsters instantly makes the site seem unprofessional and unreliable. To even browse the holsters you have you used this drop down box to select one you want to look at, this is bad user experience.
References:
http://www.blackhawk.com/
http://www.patrolstore.com/holsters.html
http://www.simplyrugged.com/
http://www.unclemikes.com/holsters
http://aliengearholsters.com/
http://www.desantisholster.com/
http://www.theholsterstore.net/
http://www.galcogunleather.com/
http://www.crossbreedholsters.com/
http://www.stickyholsters.com/
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