Woodcraft Supply Corp. is a leading seller of woodworking tools. The company has been around for 75 years and sells via retail, online and in over three million catalogues globally. Expanding the woodcrafting empire, the company publishes a magazine, licenses franchises, offers classes with certified continuing education credits and acts as a trade organization for woodworking teachers. Running all of these businesses through a single website would be a recipe for disaster, and Woodcraft has rightly chosen to create a branded network of sites to fulfill the diverse business goals. This review details the website design of the magazine site, WoodcraftMagazine.com.
The Woodcraft Network:
- Commerce: Woodcraft, Woodcraft.com
- Editorial: Woodcraft Magazine
- Learning: Woodcraft University
- Gallery: Woodcraft Gallery
- Community: Woodworking Teachers Network
Variations in the URLs mirror Woodcraft’s strategy of a consistent look and feel for all of the sites, with visual cues and navigation changes to fulfill site-specific goals. A user will always know they are within the Woodcraft brand, and be able to find their way to the other sites in the network easily.
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In a website design review of WoodcraftMagazine.com, Terri Edmonston points out the following website design tips:
- WoodcraftMagazine.com’s links to the other sites in the network serves the parent company’s business goals by increasing traffic entry points.
- There isn’t much that is innovative here. Archives, Web-extras, event listings and search are pretty basic. Print readers are not given many reasons to go online.
- Skipping the community building devices that would encourage user involvement with each other places the site on a weak foundation.
- WoodcraftMagazine.com uses a left-hand navigation that remains consistent on every page. The only exception being order pages, which appropriately simplifies the navigation down to bare essentials (removing the temptation to click out of the process).
- While the affordance is clear, the “click here’s” should be replaced to bring the site up to current standards.
