Patio Umbrella Land – the blog

One of the more exciting things about developing a website like ours is considering all the patio umbrella choices that are available.   We recently went to a patio product conference where the greatest and newest products where being shown off, and we really found it hard to resist ordering everything in sight.  From the very economical to the very deluxe, we found wonderful patio umbrellas of every size and and every material that would be awesome additions to our program, but more importantly, awesome CHOICES for our customers.

We found fantastic selections of different sizes of outdoor umbrella, from bistro size 6 and 7 foot umbrellas, to fantastic large patio umbrellas like 11′, 12′, and big ol 13′ foot umbrellas that would be awesome for large shade areas or commercial needs like restaurants and clubs.

We found materials galore like fantastic aluminum, wood, and fiberglass that combined with the right outdoor fabrics can literally make any look a patio shopper can desire.  We particularly like the fiberglass as they are wind and break resistant, eliminating a lot of home owner worries.

And OFFSETS!  Offset umbrellas, also called cantilevered umbrellas have become incredibly diverse!  Not only are sizes much more varied, but functions and styles as well!

As we prepare for our opening, we are incredibly excited at the possibilities ahead of us, and the patio umbrella products we’ll be offering to our customers.

Website navigation, I feel, is pretty crucial.  Although there are great search technologies available, I think that it’s best for a shopper to find what they are looking for within a click or two from the home page.  That’s why we’re building what we hope to be a very precise and easy to use navigation system into our framework.

Using both text and images, pretty much our whole offering should be readily available from the front page.  It’s taken us a while to really work out the details, but we feel that we’ve created a navigational system that is both easy to understand and easy to follow.

I don’t think that a lot of e-commerce sites really put a lot of thought into their navigation system.  After looking through some heat map testing, we see a lot of web user’s going straight for the search.  This is really a double edged blade, in my opinion.  On the one hand, the good news is that the average web user is well versed in internet technology and uses, they know what a search is.   However, on the other hand, it also means that they didn’t see what they where looking for when they got to the page.  This is probably a good indication that a site’s bounce rate (how many users bounce off the page) might be high, and really could be avoided.

So far, I’m pretty happy with the nav system we are working on.  In essence, it’s a project unto itself, and we’re finding really exciting ways of changing an old system of looking for something, into a new system of finding something.