Ithaca Website Redux

Moderator: ripjack13


.410
Posts: 65
Joined: Sat Oct 29, 2011 4:05 pm
Location: Ontario, Canada
PostPosted: Sun Nov 20, 2011 8:07 pm
The M37 Defense gun with pistol grip thread got me thinking about a few minor issues I have with the Ithaca website. But first a little background:

My idea of any good business is as follows

  1. An excellent product/service for a fair price.
  2. Consistently excellent customer service.
  3. Careful and conscientious advertising

In my opinion, Ithaca has absolutely nailed the first two points. They are good on the third, but there is room for some improvement; particularly their website. So what is my beef?

1) I know from this forum that Ithaca offers products that either do not appear on the website at all, or are somewhat difficult to find. A user should not have to accidentally stumble across some extra features, or products like the Home Defense models with the "tacti-cool" stocks (I am not knocking these types of stocks, by the way). These should all be front and centre on their respective pages, and at the time that they are actually available. A lot of people like to do research online - it should be easy for them to see what the company offers.

A well designed, easy to navigate website is critical to any company, even more than the print catalogue (in my opinion) as it is comparatively easy to keep it up to date with current offerings. If the 2012 catalogue comes out in January, and a new product is added in May, the customer with the catalogue is not going to know about it until 2013. Of course this point is moot if the customer is also a website user, and the website is current. (One would hope the print catalogue would encourage the reader to check the website for updates; this assumes the website is kept up to date!)

2) Secondly, I have noticed various spelling errors on the site. I know that they are typos, and we all do this - but for a company website, it really, really, REALLY looks poor. I will grant that someone is doing some work on this, as the first typo I noticed has been corrected. There is another though (If you go to this page, then hover over the "Firearms" drop down menu, you will see "M37 Waterfowel" It is little stuff like this that really ought to be diligently guarded against.

3) Finally, in connection to the previous point, when I was poking around in the source code for the pages, I noticed that each drop down menu is hard coded into each page. This really makes for a LOT more work if the web master wants to add anything new. This also greatly increases the chances of making (and missing) a typo. Whoever coded the site apparently did not know about using include files so that modifying/maintaining things becomes much, much easier. I have wondered if the current set-up on the Ithaca site (which is particularly labour intensive because of its design) is one reason why updates on the guns have not been happening.

What say you all?
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PostPosted: Mon Nov 21, 2011 3:46 am
All good points that should be addressed by their webmaster !! Hopefully they will fix it posthaste...

.22LR
Posts: 20
Joined: Wed Dec 28, 2011 11:24 pm
Location: Paradise, CA
PostPosted: Fri Dec 30, 2011 1:44 am
The site definitely has some issues. For instance, I'm in the process of acquiring a youth version of the M37 with a synthetic stock. The only reason I know it exists is because I saw one on GunBroker.com.

When I went to get more info from the Ithaca site, it was nowhere to be found. That just can't happen.
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Posts: 667
Joined: Tue May 31, 2011 9:19 pm
Location: New York
PostPosted: Sun Jan 01, 2012 10:19 pm
There is a new site in the works which will hopefully address most of these issues.

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