Tampa website design and hosting

Shawn - April 6th, 2010

This Website’s Not All It’s Cracked Up to Be

Your website is the face of your company. It needs to reflect who you are and what you do. While it helps to brand your business, your site should also function easily and actively promote the aspects that distinguish you from everyone else.

We’re picking on CrackerBarrel.com this week to illustrate website weaknesses that you should avoid.

This is a great company and is one of our favorite restaurants, but we feel the site is pretty horrible. How do visitors react who have never been to the restaurant? I guarantee their current site is costing them some business. We’d really like to know what you guys think.

So check out the Cracker Barrel site; if you’ve ever been to one of their restaurants they have a decidedly unique appeal, but unfortunately we get no sense of that here:

• Header Navigation (About Us, Menu, Online Store, etc.): Very hard to read and most of the icons don’t effectively convey what they reveal.
• Logo Placement and Sizing: There is nothing about the site that makes you feel you are immersed in the Cracker Barrel experience.
• Their very recognizable logo is the least outstanding figure on the site.
• The links on the left column navigation bar sort of look like afterthoughts.
• Instead of a Locations link, there really should be a prominent spot on the Home Page to enable a search of the location of the nearest restaurant. It should also provide the address, phone number, hours, and menu of those locations.
• They’ve got these great trivia games that are integral to the Cracker Barrel model, but the games page does not endorse the restaurant at all! It features neither the logo or a great tag line or a link to daily specials or anything! If a visitor comes from a search engine directly to this page they probably won't even realize they're on a restaurant's website, let alone Cracker Barrel’s. So what good are these games if they're not advertising the company?

And for our final lambast on poor Cracker Barrel:

• Their restaurants have a very nostalgic feel both inside and out. The website, although it feels extremely dated, doesn’t really convey the attitude of the restaurants.

In other words, a site’s design can still be modern (clean, bold, easy to read and navigate, and build brand awareness) while staying true to the concept. Visitors like the look of nostalgia, but they are less than patient when sites “act” old. Cracker Barrel is not visually or effectively shouting out.

Our bottom line here is that a better designed website and interface could greatly benefit them and anyone else who takes a cue about what not to do. We’d appreciate your buy-in…if you come across a site that you believe requires a cyber-assessment, please let us know in the comments. And if you disagree with any of our opinions, then we really want to know that too!