Time for another cigar website review and the lucky winner is Rocky Patel’s Website. This week we have another example of a site that, while visually appealing, could use a tune up.
Cigar Information: B
The cigars listed have a good amount of detail, giving a short description of each brand along with names and sizes. Unfortunately the site isn’t fully up to date, as I noticed there was no information available on the newly released Edge Sumatra.
Company Information: B
They do have information about Rocky, and several ways to contact the company. The email address belongs to indiantabac.com domain, which doesn’t have a website on it, a simple redirect back to their main site is needed. Changing the email address to one on therockypatel .com domain is a must also. The Event Calendar is updated through the end of the month with not only events, but also show events where you can meet Rocky himself.
Website Features and Usability: C
Too images and not enough text just really hurts them in this category, it slows down the load time and feels clunky at times. They do have forums and a blog, but you have to go to the About or Contact Page to get to them instead of being linked at the bottom along with everything else. The site feels more like a magazine ad than it does a website.
Recommendations:
Designed completely with images, the site is obviously difficult to update when new products are released. Also text is much more search engine friendly, so having some text on the site would be a plus. The blog needs to be moved in house and off of MySpace. Once it is moved, in-house links to the the Blog and the Forums in the main menu would help promote them.At the moment the forums have very little activity and I’m not about to trudge into the teenage angst ridden world of MySpace if I don’t have to.
Update: They don’t use Flash as heavily as I thought, for some reason that intro of the different cigars that splashes up stuck in my head.
Popularity: 7% [?]
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That’s just bad marketing. If you’re trying to promote Rocky Patel as a premium brand, why choose MySpace? At least use Facebook for updates, or use a Wordpress-powered blog.
I talked to Nish about the site during the Big Smoke. He said it is a very temp site and a new one will be up soon. He said they are doing some cool video stuff with Rocky as well. He expects it to be end by the end of the year.
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