Baskets and Blossoms: Redesign Alert

It's hard enough these days to get customers to visit your site; it's even trickier to keep them on it. A customer can leave a site for several reasons: She may find the design unappealing, the content hard to read, or simply may not find the information she was looking for. Unfortunately, Baskets and Blossoms suffers from all of these conditions.

Navigation

Starting on a positive note, I do like the fact that the navigation is categorized into a “shop by selection” format. I also like the fact that some of the other key sections are highlighted through the top navigation. However, the top navigation is barely visible due to the dark color scheme.

Although the left nav is more appealing, it lacks in usability. If you click on a component in the left nav, you are brought to another section of the same page; in this regard, you are not able to view the navigation options from most sections. Ultimately, this causes you to leave the site if you're not interested in what you're viewing.

The designers try to compensate for this by providing "back to top" links at the end of each section; however, this creates an extra step for the user. In addition, clicking one of these links doesn't take the visitor to the top of the page -- it only takes her to the beginning of the "Shop by Selection" navigation, causing her to miss the entire top navigation.

Images

Perhaps even more repelling than the navigation is the animated image of the dancing roses at the top of the page. In order to convey added appeal, animated images must be used very carefully in web design. In this case, the image is distracting and compromises the professionalism of the site.

A general issue with the images is that they are low resolution; this includes the company's logo, which should by nature be visually appealing. Not to mention, most of the pictures are too small. The customer does not have the ability to zoom in, and some items (like “Teatime”) do not even have pictures.

Font

Apart from the navigation and images, the font could use some work. It's a known fact that bold, italics, and underline are all great tools for highlighting important text; when used together, however, the text appears unprofessional. This is the case with the text at the top of the page. Font size is also an issue, most notably in the text below the address on the left.


If Baskets and Blossoms improved in even a couple of these areas, I'm sure they would see considerably higher conversion rates. It's true that the company isn't nearly as big as ftd.com or 1800flowers.com -- but if they don't follow these basic design principles, they never will be.