Williams-Sonoma vs. Sur La Table: Homepage
I like cooking and I love internet retail so comparing Williams-Sonoma and Sur La Table’s websites seemed like a natural thing to do. Williams-Sonoma obviously has more resources than Sur La Table (they are much, much bigger), but in a lot of ways this can be a disadvantage.
Large companies often deal with more red tape (on a side note, one company I have done work with requires everything on their website to go through their legal department. I suggested that they try user-generated content at one point and they just laughed).
Layout - Williams-Sonoma
I like how Williams-Sonoma uses their real estate on their homepage. I am using a 13″ laptop and I still see a ton of wasted space on the right and left side of the Sur La Table page. I initially thought that SLT’s site was just a little more busy (cluttered), but then I realized that they both have a comparable amount of information, WS’s presentation just makes it look a little cleaner.
URL - Sur La Table
It drives me crazy that Williams Sonoma uses a hyphen in their name, but at least williamssonoma.com now resolves to williams-sonoma.com (it hasn’t always done that).
SurLaTable just wins by default here since they don’t have a hyphen, but there is one small thing that still bugs me - if you go to SurLaTable.com everything looks normal, but if you click on the site logo to return to the homepage from anywhere on the site it takes you to http://wwwsurlatable.com/home.do - I get what’s going on here, but it’s totally unnecessary.
Williams Sonoma links their logo to http://www.williams-sonoma.com/index.cfm, but they remove the index.cfm part when you get there. This probably doesn’t matter for most people, but it just makes it slightly easier to link back to them (or at least less confusing).
Title Tag - Williams-Sonoma
Sur La Table: “Sur La Table”
Williams-Sonoma: “Cookware, Cooking Utensils, Kitchen Decor & Gourmet Foods | Williams-Sonoma”
Now, these are just the homepage title tags - Sur La Table does a better job on their subpages. My problem with SLT’s homepage title tag is that if I tell somebody to go to their site and they are using google to try to remember the name and they type in “Sir La Table,” scanning through the titles of the results doesn’t make it immediately obvious that SLT has anything to do with cooking.
Of course if the searcher takes the time to read the description under the link (which is pulled from the meta description) they will figure it out, but some people are just lazy, especially if they aren’t sure if they have the right name. Contrast that with a google search for “william sonoma” - obviously that first link is what you’re looking for, right?
Also, Williams-Sonoma gets the slight SEO benefit out of this - their homepage ranks on the first page of google for “kitchen decor,” a term that apparently gets about 220 searches per day.
Conclusion
Williams-Sonoma wins this round, but I like to cheer for the underdog. I would really like to see Sur La Table improve their website and give Williams-Sonoma a run for their money.
I don’t really have a great reason for wanting to see SLT win a battle other than the fact that I slightly prefer shopping at Sur La Table (they have a store up in Salt Lake, in Gateway).If I were SLT I would also consider implementing user reviews - this improves conversion rates and helps you get some free organic links.
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