Nicholson
1
Bryon Nicholson
English 313
Web-Site Analysis
September 20, 2005
A proper website, maintained, and well built, can have dramatic effects on a
business, and its sales. Having a poorly run website not only wastes the time of the
customers and other audience members visiting the page, but also gives an air of
unprofessionalism that can be detrimental to a business. Keeping a site active and up-todate is sometimes a very challenging task, though with the correct methods, having a well
written website can be an extremely helpful tool for any business.
The primary objective in any website is to provide effective information, and
communication to the customer or viewer of the website in a simple and easy to
understand manner. The website www.plumbsupply.com is a website for a wholesale
plumbing and heating supplier. The obvious target audience, from experience within the
company, is primarily the contractors then, secondarily, is targeted at the homeowners
who buy from Plumb Supply Company.
However by going to their homepage, you might be initially confused exactly
what the website is for. Most of the pages bandwidth and images solely focus on their
special events. These special events include planned vacations, fishing trips, and even
golf outings. This is a stark contrast to the content of material that one would expect
Nicholson
2
looking at who the website is supposedly targeted at. One would assume that the website
would contain useful information about new and upcoming products that the company is
offering, or perhaps sales or even a photo gallery for the customer to find the exact parts
that they are looking for, instead of pictures of people they have no interest in at all
fishing and golfing.
This is further complicated when the website is taken with the initial impression
that it gives the audience. If it was not for the page containing the About information, the
person who visited this website would have a hard time finding what the website is
actually for, making the visitor think far too much, and therefore making them lose
interest in the site very quickly. However the website’s saving grace is that it is well
written for both customers and contractors therefore whatever messages about their latest
fishing and golfing expeditions are being deemed necessary for public viewing, for better
or worse, are being understood.
One of the most important things for a website to do is to convey credibility. This
can be done in many ways, through the credibility of a known person, or by invoking
certain emotions in people, or simply by providing logical evidence to the reader.
Usually these methods are subtle, and are not given much though when viewing a
website, but they are essential pieces to include in your website.
The emotional appeal that a website, advertisement, or argument has known as
pathos, and the company Plumb Supply delivers in this category of their website. The
Nicholson
3
Plumb Supply mascot, Plumb Bob, has been the company mascot for over sixty years,
representing the quality, dedication, and long history of customer service. This image
forms the centerpiece of the Plumb Supply homepage. This image ensures the
contractors and the customers that they have a long-standing, successful company
backing all of the products that they buy. However this is the only real appeal that the
website as visually to any sort of pathos. This effect could be greatly enhanced if the
creators of the website would also include some of the images from products that they
sell, such as Kohler, and Delta, both with long lines of credibility, trust, and reputations
for excellence. The creators of the website are sorely missing out on a very easy way to
increase their credibility, and it is something that should be capitalized upon.
In addition to their work with their pathos argument, Plumb Supply Company also
has a strong ethos argument, not only do they use their mascot and his images very well,
they also give the company history and it’s background information, ensuring customers
that they are a very reputable company. This is a very effective method to convey the
trustworthiness of the website, and the company as a whole. This paired again with their
reputable suppliers, gives an air of confidence to anyone who visits the website or who
buys their products. However once again, there should be more than just text links
deeply embedded in the page to help maintain their reputability.
Plumb Supply however does a poor job on the logos aspect of the website. The
page is just not laid out well at all. This disorganized feel, as well as no real information
easily accessable is not only frustrating, but also gives the image that the company is just
Nicholson
4
either not interested in building a good website, doesen’t care enough about the
customers, or just doesn’t have the resources to maintain a proper web-page. This indeed
is a heavy blow to take, however the saving grace is that the audience for this industry is
not a very computer or technological savvy field. Most of the targeted audience, being
the contractors who buy directly from the company, still have fairly low powered
computers, and do not fully take advantage of everything that the internet, and that
computers have to offer. So while this is a weakness in their company, and in the website
as a whole, it is a problem that is not critically important as of this moment.
One of the major downfalls of the Plumb Supply website is the gross overuse of
excessively large pictures in the website. Plumb Supply has many different images, on
their website, ranging from buildings, to showrooms. These pictures were taken directly
from a digital camera and directly loaded onto the web. While the quality of these
pictures is extremely good, the offset is an extremely slow loading time for the website.
Each one of the pictures in the photo gallery would take at least one minute each to
download for viewing. This is ridiculous when you look into the HTML code to see that
the webmaster resized the pictures using HTML, instead of a photo editing software
package. This results in the website wasting bandwidth, and wasting time, for no
apparent reason at all, especially considering that the images were never meant to be a
seen the way they appear on the website. This problem isn’t just localized to the pictures
in the image gallery either. Nearly every picture on the Plumb Supply page is oversized
for the purpose it is serving. From their banner pictures, to their pictures of fishing trips,
the files are just too large.
Nicholson
5
Not only is there an excess of large pictures on the page. There is also an excess
of un-used files and folders in the website as well. Looking at the linking and
organizational scheme of the website, it becomes immeadiately apparent that there are
many useless files hidden on the server. Downloading the site to look at in a web editor,
such as Adobe Go Live, instantly shows what appears to be an organizational nightmare.
All of the files are in need of sorting, and categorizing, and in many cases, deleting
It won’t matter what kinds of products, service, or information you give the
audience of your website if you cannot create a website that is informative, useful, and
easy to navigate, and Plumb Supply company is a perfect example how poor planning,
and architecture can be the make-or-break factor in web-page development.
Plumb Supply uses a fairly consistent method of categorical organization
throughout their website, exceptions given for their vendor links listed alphabetically, and
the company timeline listed temporally. This method of organization is very easy, and
very simple to follow, and it is one of the most common types of organization on the web
today. This method of organization makes it very easy for the targeted audience to use
the website in an effective manner. Although their organizational scheme is easy to
figure out, actually figuring out how to navigate through the site is another matter
entirely.
The linking and navigability of the Plumb Supply site is one of the worst qualities
of the website. The website features two different places where they hide their main
Nicholson
6
navigation links on the website. The major downfall is that there is no real order or
reason to how these links are separated, or as to why they are separated. The most
obvious place is at the top of their website as a banner stretching across the top of the
main page. This location contains four links to their company information, showroom,
order entry, and products pages. On top of these categories seeming to be a little
overlapped, such as the products and showroom pages, the actual navigation buttons
themselves are flawed. The Webmaster tried to create a 3-D effect using regular text, and
colored link text. Instead of creating the desired effect, the CSS sheet that was being
used increased the size of the non-link text a larger size of text, actually covering up the
link, and making it hard to see what was actually going on.
The second area where the links on the site were put was in the middle right of the
main site. In addition to this being one of the worst places to put links, there were more
misnomers in the titling of the links. The links were to a photo gallery, events calendar,
reference tools, and a location list. Initially one might think that the photo gallery might
contain useful photographs of products, or people, but instead contains grossly large
pictures of seeming randomly assorted events, such as company gold outings, and fishing
outings, in no particular order, not only wasting the viewers time, but also serving no real
purpose for the site, or their bandwidth usage.
Not only do they have a seemingly random system for link placing, and naming.
They also do not have a system for carrying their navigation through to the rest of the
site. Their order entry page is completely different it it’s setup from the main page, and
Nicholson
7
any of the other web-pages besides the homepage no longer contain any of the useful
links, such as the reference tools while looking at products. Adding these together makes
this a losing combination for the navigation of Plumb Supply’s website.
The Plumb Supply Company website would be vastly improved with many minor
changes as well. Excluding all of the design flaws highlighted above, the website could
use a combination of the vendor and showroom links, to make more of an interactive
showroom, with links to the product vendors, and specifications right with the images of
the products, helping ease the process of getting information about a product. Another
helpful suggestion would be to add in a search function for contractors, so they could
easily search for a certain product that they had a question for. The system of
alphabetizing vendors, with links to their homepages just doesn’t work. It would be
much faster for the visitor to the website to just use a search engine to find the site in
most cases.
Writing a website to target your intended audience with good information and
content is an extremely powerful tool for success, with constant upkeep, and knowledge
of workings of a website, and it’s design, a company can have business flourish.