Current Website
Mission
Direct from website:
"Sherwood's Forest is a full service landscape contractor, nursery, and retail garden center. Our plant inventory is extensive and growing every year."
Sherwood's Forest serves the St. Louis area across many levels of landscaping and gardening needs. They take pride in their large inventory, allowing them to offer a diverse selection for their customers. They strongly value education, providing many outside links to resources on plant care, gardening ideas, local events and clubs, and other landscaping/gardening-related resources.
Audience
- Middle-aged and older women with enough disposable income for fairly involved gardening projects.
- Local businesses with landscaping needs, who prefer to work with local rather than chain vendors.
- Wide range of locals who have small-project needs
Strengths
- Really nice images in galleries, showcases product and successful application
- Provides related links - shows interest/investment in their field
- Though it's ugly, they made an attempt at visual consistency through color and icons
Weaknesses
- Elements are way too crowded on all the pages, strange/ineffective arrangements and alignments
- Inventory lists are difficult to navigate, disconnected from any helpful pictures, need more division
- Some links and features appear to be broken
- Nav bar needs to simplify and distinguish visually from the rest of the page
- Ambiguous hierarchy of links and information on the home page
Competitor Websites
New Garden
- Much better organizational structure
- Combines home and about pages for a more informative and effective homepage
- Better use of photography, doesn't restrict images to galleries
- Resources are organized and purposeful
McShane's Nursery
- Effective and inviting homepage image
- Establishes credibility through team bios and reviews on homepage
- Really clear/easy to navigate listing and explanation of services
- Lots of links and resources, but well organized
- Consistent use of design scheme
Chalet Nursery
- Good example of a simple but effective homepage, key features in "Chalet Highlights" section
- Simple, logical navigation
- Categories broken down well within pages
- Emphasizes 100-year legacy through logo and use of old photos
Visual Inspiration
