Website Evaluation In-Class Essay
The ULTA Beauty website (www.ulta.com/) is as a premier beauty destination targeting women and women who seek different trending and classy beauty products. The website’s purpose is to offer premium beauty products including cosmetics, fragrance, skin, hair care products, and salon services from well-established and emerging beauty brands across all categories and price points. With more than 500 beauty brands, the website offers at least 25,000 products. Any new visitor vising the site for the first time can easily note that the site focuses on elegance and quality. Since the website mainly targets young people, the tone of voice is a fun and classy shopping store focused on offering trending and diverse beauty products.
The website has a header with the signup, rewards, search, and rewards sections. The left sidebar has a menu with different categories of beauty products. Most of the products target young women although there is a men’s section just before the different customer packages such as gifts, coupons, and allure winners section. The main content area includes pictures of different products and their prices with a slider. Finally, the lower tab before the footer includes a section of key components about the company, sitemap, and other services offered. This section provides users with crucial information, such as shipping procedures, how to track orders, different stores owned by the company, and payment options
The slider is the first noticeable feature as well as the pictures of different products offered. All products come with a different background that matches with the image. The white theme for the website also makes it easier to note different links. Finally, the website includes a streaming headline of Black Friday offers among other gifts and discounts offered. The visual features are attractive to the viewer and given the high quality of the images and the matching background, the user can only conclude that the products are elegant, quality, and classy.
The website is easy to navigate since it highlights different categories that users can easily choose from in the sidebar menus. The slider is also catchy and a user can easily explore more areas of the website. Additionally, the footer with “FREE SHIPPING on any $35 purchase” is also visible and attractive. Further, since the sidebar menu is static, one does not have to scroll to check the categories of products.
Although the main target is women, it would be better to make the Men’s section visible by rearranging the sidebar list. New visitors cannot easily see these attributes unless they are keen on checking the menu and may easily conclude that the website only targets women. The slider speed is also quite fast and a visitor may not get enough time to get a snapshot of common products. Further, given that the website does not have a live chat option, it would be better to include a contact us option that visitors can easily see. This can be included bottom right or the header.
Given its simple appeal but detailed menu, slides, footer, header, and content arrangement, the website is effective in conveying its underlying information. The first view and conclusion a visitor gets is that this is an online beauty products shop, which mainly targets young women. The quality of the images provides presents its classy nature and convinces the visitor to explore more options such as the categories in the sidebar and even use the search option in the header. However, it is important to focus on categorizing the sidebar into men’s and women’s collections.