Perusing the Patagonia site

Outdoor gear and apparel merchant Patagonia is renowned for its handsome, rugged products and the adventure photography in its catalogs. But how is its site at selling products and handling search?

Critiquers Amy Africa, president of Helena, VT-based Web consultancy Eight by Eight, and Brian R. Brown, lead consultant/natural search marketing strategist with Madison, WI-based SEO agency Netconcepts, gave Patagonia.com a thorough workover. Africa scrutinized the site's content and functionality, and Brown tested its search capability. Here's what they had to say.

	AMY AFRICA

I love to surf. There's something magical about riding the waves that words simply can't express. Nature reminds us how small we are in the big scheme of things. Surfing goes a step further in that, no matter how good you are, at the end, you always fall. It's a humbling experience.

Kind of like the Patagonia Website.

Here's the thing. I have a closet full of Patagonia clothes. I like the company's product. I just don't like its Website.

First things first: The initial entry page on the Patagonia site is a “choose your country” welcome page? Good Lord. How 2001 is that? There is dirt-cheap software that pulls your location with about 98% accuracy. The site should use it. Period.

To add an insult to injury, the next page is another honking large photo with very limited navigation. What does it say to your users when your first page asks them something you should already know, and the second has a search function in the hot spot, a big picture and a couple of other random choices? If navigation accounts for over half of your success online, what does it say when you don't give your site users any?

Navigation is a self-fulfilling prophecy: You get what I give you. If I don't give you a choice on my Website, you don't have it. It's as simple as that. How much do I, as a company, care about your order when I don't show you anything to buy or give you easy access to your shopping cart?

If you work at Patagonia you'd probably say (and yes, I asked) that Environmentalism and Blog (two of the four items in the navigation) are just as important as Clothing & Gear and Shop by Sport, or that My Gear really is an adequate name for a perpetual shopping cart.

I'd beg to differ.

Users, no matter how loyal they are to your brand, need clear directions on how to use your Website. They need solid navigation — at the bare minimum, that's a good top action bar that tells them what they are supposed to do at the Website, and a comprehensive, easy-to-maneuver index of your store on the left. Users don't want to work hard to find something.

In lieu of solid navigation, Patagonia pushes its text search. Not a great idea, especially when you have a very weak search like this. (Searching for woman's rashguard yields exactly zero products and two topics.)

The Clothing & Gear category page allows you to select which type of item you're interested in by men, women's, kids and travel gear. Unfortunately, the comprehensive list that it gives you in the action-bar rollover disappears — and those are your only choices.

The Shop by Sport category page has a lot of potential but the content far outweighs the commerce, and there's nothing to buy in the first view. Both pages are alienating to someone who isn't a sophisticated online shopper. Content can be a fantastic addition to a site, but it needs to be properly balanced with the commerce. Patagonia's is not.

Patagonia is sneaky in that the site uses a lot of text. Search engines love text. The footers are longer than War and Peace and packed with keywords, so from an organics perspective, it's kinda-sorta great. From a user perspective? Not so much.

People see things in pictures, not in text, so the bottom 50%+ part of the entry page is wasted. Sure, the site probably gets some clicks from the diehards, but are those people browsers or buyers?

More important, if they were originally coming to buy and get lost in the jungle of articles, what happens to them then? (Bizarrely enough, Patagonia carries its lengthy footers throughout the checkout — the worst possible place to distract people.)

The merchant's photos are high quality and well executed. It does an excellent job using multiple visuals, and an equally horrendous job with its color, size and quantity presentation. I'm sure Olallaberry and Chanterelle are perfectly acceptable name choices for colors on one of the planets, but if you're going to use them on this one, you really should make it more apparent (meaning not in light gray text and with smackier, easier-to-use drop-down boxes).

The add-to-gear buttons are sized for a mouse — and even worse, there is only one per page. If you have long pages, as Patagonia does, and especially if you are using reader reviews, you really need to have add-to-cart or buy-now buttons on every view. (So every time the user scrolls to “see a new page” he or she should be presented with the opportunity to buy.)

Several of the forms pages need help. The catalog-request page doesn't have a picture of the current catalog. The e-mail sign-up page has a lengthy statement about personal information. The thank-you pages both are dead-ends — no visuals and nothing to entice you back into the site. Just a “thanks, you'll be hearing from us soon.”

Clicking on the blog brings you to www.thecleanestline.com and takes you completely off the site. Granted, there is a link in the upper-left-hand corner sandwiched in the blog description. But it's buried and, frankly, quite unacceptable. If you want to have a blog, so be it, but please don't make it difficult for potential customers to get back to your site once they've visited it.