I was lucky enough to find some fireplace sites on http://www.alexa.com which gave me some useful demographics information about sites in this industry. The two sites I picked featured on there, and although the statistics are mainly US based, they tied in with my “gut feeling” for the UK audience make-up.
I have chosen to review John Lewis, because there is a store locally and they had a good range of products and a mature ecommerce platform online. I also chose Fireplaces Are Us, as they offer a wide range of discounted models from their warehouse – a typical online store offering good prices because of lower overheads.
During my consultancy visit, I am going to show the site owners how to review competitor websites and assess their strengths and weaknesses – something I think is vital to online success. There are some more local companies I could have included in my research, but I didn’t think they had a sufficiently good website to use as candidates for teaching competitive review techniques. (I teach competitive review techniques in my usability course.)
I will recommend that the site owner checks out local competition to start developing their insight, since a lot of the local websites are used in conjunction with a bricks and mortar store. The Chiswick Fireplace Company has a physical store too.
I have found some interesting things when reviewing the two competitor sites – and one thing that has struck me is that neither site changes the colour of product links that have been visited.
When it comes to fireplaces, a lot of the names are abstract and quite similar – for example a set of marble surrounds might be named after Italian cities like Roma or Firenze, and it’s difficult for users to remember exactly which one has been viewed before. I think they’re missing a trick there. The visited links should change colour.
John Lewis’s site does add an on-page section which covers any recently viewed items, but that’s a long way down on the page, well away from the product listings. It would be a lot less eye-tracking and mental interruption if the product link changed to a “visited colour”.
I’ve added the links here so you can check out the sites and you can follow what’s going on.
Really looking forward to explaining these findings to my “World Usability Day” client 
