Comment · Wed, February 14, 2024 · ND Owner
Website Redesign - Feedback Needed!
Original post in this thread
MisterYouAreSoDumb · 47 points
Hello everyone! I want to preface by thanking all of you for your support over the years. We are only a few months away from the 11 year anniversary of me founding this company! As many of you know, we launched right here on Reddit, and Redditors have been a big part of making us who we are today. My journey founding and growing this company has been a rollercoaster, to say the least. My main mission from day one has been to advance the lab testing and quality control standards of the industry. That mission has never changed. If you have followed me over the years, you probably already know that has been a challenging mission. Challenging isn't even really a word that scratches the surface. The past decade has been some of the most difficult of my life. I am proud of all that we have accomplished, and the hurdles we have overcome. I might be beaten and bruised from that journey, but I am in no way defeated. I could not, and would not, still be here today pushing forward on that same mission without the support from all of you, so from the bottom of my heart, thank you!
Now onto the main reason for this post. We have started the process of a complete redesign of our site. As with…
What they were answering
RarageInTheGarage · 2 points
One of the main changes we are making is simplifying the category structure.
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The other thing we are going to implement is a tagging system.
Should the manually-curated "categories" really just be "tags" under the covers? Meaning, the only difference is "categories" are presented up-front on the front page and sitewide menu drop-downs etc, while other "tags" require you to go a little more out of your way to search. That'd make categories simpler to implement in the backend, while lettings tags be flexible to serve everyone's needs I think.
When you talk about "how does a customer discover our product listings sanely?", IMO you need to treat this differently for new vs existing customers, novice vs expert customers. Remember that part of the reason why manufacturers are willing to work with ND on things like Immuse first is explicitly because of ND's existing expert customer base. ND has very good reasons to avoid overcommitting to just new novice customers' user experience - that said, today things are obviously pretty rough.
New novice customers are more likely to be interested in searching by "effects", and I agree those should be the prominent categories/tags in the website UX. However, advanced customers will be more likely to search by "amino acid", "dopaminergic", "cholinergic", "5-HT2A", "ACh inhibitor", "MAO/MAO-B inhibitor", etc etc.
Probably the bulk…
u/MisterYouAreSoDumb · ND Owner
Thanks for all the suggestions! Yes, the new site will have much better back end analytics. Analytics will be built into the structure of the theme, and then we will set up much more comprehensive GA4 events based on that. It's going to help us get a lot better data to make decisions.
I definitely get the balance between new/novice customers and our existing/advanced customers. It's going to have to be a balance. I don't want to dumb it down, but I do want to simplify how we convey the information, and make the UI much more conducive to actually finding the information or functions that already exist. A bunch of people on here have been suggesting functions that already exist on our site. However, because the UI isn't the best at showing those functions, they go unused. That's kind of the same concept for the information on the site. Many people just don't respond to 4 paragraphs of information on a product page. They might want to know the information in those paragraphs, but they will never read them, so it is not providing the function it is designed for. This is the crux of what we want to improve. So while I say simplifying the data and design, I don't mean dumbing down and removing info. I more mean conveying that information in a way that people will actually see and absorb it.
The other aspect of all this, which most consumers don't really think or even care about, is SEO. We used to rank organically for a lot of keywords. In many cases, we used to be number 1 and 2 on results for Google. That's no longer the case. We have fallen way way off on organic rankings because we didn't grow and shift with the ever changing SEO landscape. There have been a bunch of search algorithm changes in the almost 11 years we have been operating. The ones that have happened in the last 2-3 years have been the most comprehensive. We need to revamp our design with user experience in mind first and foremost, but we also need to ensure it meets the current best practices for SEO. One of those aspects is a simple category structure. Google actually penalizes you if you have too complex of a category or site structure.