I think that's a great commercial website, better than the majority of commercial websites in existence today.
I would include several sentences about the business and a photo or two for perfection.
"BikeTek sells and repairs all kinds of bicycles, with an emphasis on left-handed 7-wheeled racing bicycles. We maintain an inventory of about 700 bicycles and can get anything you want in stock within a week."
I would also probably make it a minimally valid HTML page. But other than that, perfect.
That's not the intended audience. They are not going to sell shares on the base of the website alone.
The web site is there to inform fans and shareholders.
By the way:
"If you have any comments about our WEB page, you can either write us at the address shown above or e-mail us at berkshire@berkshirehathaway.com. However, due to the limited number of personnel in our corporate office, we are unable to provide a direct response."
Easy enough to make it useful - and look exactly the same - by linking the address to a map, the email to a sendto:, etc.
There's a fine line between "minimalist" and "inadequate". We're in 2011; I expect a website be simple yet intuitively, if not proactively, functional.
Why bother? I imagine that from their standpoint, a website is a glorified business card. They're not trying to impress or sell you anything, but at the same time they went to the trouble of posting virtually all the useful information you could need. Yes, they could link to google maps, but your business card doesn't do that, so why should their website?
If I (re)learned anything from this site, it's that "because it can" is a crappy reason to add features. I'm sure this site serves them very well.
"Yes, they could link to google maps, but your business card doesn't do that, so why should their website?"
Back of my next business card (currently designing) will have a map on the back. Same point: all relevant information should be there, answering obvious questions before they're asked.
Because it's a website. If I expected a business card, I'd ask for a business card. I go to the website because I expect it to give me relevant information. If I go to the website and find that I have to go to Google to search for directions or a map, you lose out on a lot. Number one, I'm no longer primarily thinking about your establishment. Number two, my time is wasted. Number three, as I'm searching Google, it recommends a closer bike shop.
It's a webpage, I don't see it unreasonable at all to expect or hope that it has basic webpage features.
As a customer, I know that the effort to insert two <a href> tags is microscopic compared to even a small number of customers having to do those actions manually. And if that tiny bit of effort causes even one additional conversion... it seems absolutely worth it. No?
They're not trying to impress or sell you anything
You seem to have forgotten that part.
By the way, remember that this is a bicycle shop we're talking about. They probably spend a lot more time thinking about bicycles than SEO or optimizing click-through to visit ratios, and IMHO that's how it should be.
Select, right-click, copy, Ctrl-T, tab, right-click, paste, enter. 302,000 results. First one is probably it, and has a map ... but there's all this other stuff which I spend a couple useless seconds reviewing because I already spent enough time (8 steps) to get to this page.
But wait, that's not where I start. The issue arises because I'm _already_ looking at biketek.com, so it doesn't occur to me to "google biketek" (if I'm a legitimate customer, how do you think I probably got to the website in the first place?). The address is right there; I want to know where that is on a map. So... select address, right-click, copy, Ctrl-T, maps.google.com, right-click, hope the split lines will paste properly, paste, sigh with relief that it did (often doesn't for some reason), enter, ah there it - but is it really? I've had some problems with incorrect locations for addresses lately, so it'd be nice if someone had already verified the map is correct. 7 steps plus fussing.
The alternative I'm pushing for is: click. There's the map, verified, in 1 step.
Sorry, which way is "minimalist"?
Yeah, I know. "Just do ... ... ... That's it." The difference between 7-8 steps and 1 is why Apple's market cap is ~$0.3T.
This is a bicycle shop. They think about bicycles, not SEO.
Are you arguing they would be better off with no webpage? Or that they need to hire a webmaster? Do you even know that they get significant web traffic? Perhaps it's all word of mouth.
I like it. The same uber-minimalist concept, but a minimal but perhaps optimal set of smart additions [In order of importance, 1) description of services offered, 2) map link, 3) aesthetic fonts, colours, layout].
If you have a business which doesn’t rely on the web to acquire customers a description is really only noise. (I also think that adding just one sentence or two wouldn’t turn this into a successful acquisition tool.)
(I think colors and layout are perfectly alright. Also, some people hate the Trebuchet font, I don’t. It looks great for this application.)
A sentence or two wouldn't turn it into a successful acquisition tool, but given that the site includes no identifying design elements (logo, shared visual aesthetic with other marketing materials, etc), a one-sentence description would serve as a good last-minute sanity check that the user has indeed found the right business ("Oh, so this is definitely the Biketek that sells fixed-gear bicycles in Pittsburgh, not the Biketek that manufactures exercise bikes and has a business office in Pittsburgh").
Every time I go to a restaurant that's practically empty, I check the website on my phone and it's always really bad (busy restaurants usually have at least a decent site). The worst part is I often offer to do a redesign for a modest price but they never see the value in it.
I think it's an interesting issue. I'm not actually convinced that restaurants even really need much of a website, honestly. The busy ones could probably do fine without altogether.. so in some ways, the indifference isn't what surprises me... What surprises me is the unbelievably awful 5,000-10,000$ flash monstrosities that make it basically impossible for me to figure out if you've got egg salad.
For me the world is split first into things assist in, or get in the way of me eating egg salad.
There are several people on HN who have tried to attack that market, in various ways. I'd be interested if any of reads this how they've fared? It's a hard, hard market...
It's crazy, I've gone rock bottom and offered a one-page redesign for $500 (for a restaurant whose site was just a logo and a link to a PDF of their menu), and it's still like pulling teeth. I understand that they're very cash-conscious (my father owns a restaurant), but they lose way more money than that on those dumb coupon books that mainly attract cheapskate customers who never come back.
No, but thanks for sharing. Now I've got someone else to wish I was! (Filing Oatmeal Guy between Tina Fey and the homeless guy in my neighborhood that looks like Mick Jagger)
This is a huge point. It really is. So many websites turn me off because they're not mobile friendly when I want to read them. At least this one is. I could go in and get exactly the information I needed, and without 400 redirects and page-reshapings for all the pictures that'd be displayed.
So this is what it feels like when I hear people discuss art.
One side claims it's genius with everything taken away lest only the most pertinent information. Inserts a gobbit from Einstein on minimalism and strokes his beard in awe.
Has anyone ever done good research on how a minimalist web site might compare to a fancier version with respect to the various objectives of the site owner? Some other minimalist sites that perform quite well are Hacker News and Craigslist. Have site owners been mis-led into thinking that flashiness equates to credibility or customer satisfaction?
My gut feel is that they're probably one of those businesses who, if you don't already know exactly what they do, you're not part of their target market.
This is _exactly_ the sort of website I'll suggest if, say, Stradivarius came to me and said "I want a website for my violin building business".
If your demand so outstrips your supply that there's no way you need more customers than you're already servicing, why would you need anything more than this for a website?
Exactly. I have no idea. Do they sell bikes? Repair bikes? Manufacture them?
If they do sell bikes, I think they at the very least need an inventory list. I hate store sites where I can't search to see if you have a product and what the price is.
While it is minimal, its about as useful to me a yellow page ad -- which is to say it also has minimal value.
I used to live a few blocks away from this place. They sell and service bikes and sell related gear. They're a fairly run-of-the-mill higher-end bike shop.
Actually much like the humans.txt file for sites -- all sites should have a contact.txt file that is modeled after this and has one URL to their address on gmaps.
so you could type into your browser: hardknoxcafe.com/contact.txt and get all the info you needed.
Pretty soon, we'll need some sort of index to manage all of these text files full of useful information. We can connect them together to make it easier to navigate. Let's call these hyperlinks.
i don't know their audience but i imagine they're leaving opportunities on the table. still, it's better than many commercial sites who try to do more.
what i would really do is to microformat the address and relevant data so i can be sure they're properly crawled and treated. presentation clearly doesn't matter much here.
I hope that this style catches on - better than the blog templates most people use. Being a bike store I would have thought they'd list brands and specialities though.. It seems the site would only be useful if you know the shop.
I expect to find this information without having to leave google maps. Store hours is the only reason I end up going to a website when I need contact information, which I despise having to do.
I like it - it should have a little styling though. Like a nice font.
It would also be cool if they had something that indicated really quickly what they did... visually, maybe a picture of a bike, or the store or something. Even better if the picture was animated like those other websites.
I like music too - maybe they could play stairway to heaven real loud as soon as I got there. That would be sweet!
Maybe they could engage me better if they had the text do something... like use the <blink> tag.
I tried to like this on facebook and share it on twitter after wanting to post it to digg -- but the buttons dont seem to load for me.
Nice. I'd love to know what percentage of readers here realize you are joking. Sheldon Cooperism is pretty rampant in these parts, so I am guessing less than 90%.
What I really like about it is you can find their store hours right away; countless shops here have that information very well hidden under unsuspecting links like "about" ("Impressum" in German).
I would include several sentences about the business and a photo or two for perfection.
"BikeTek sells and repairs all kinds of bicycles, with an emphasis on left-handed 7-wheeled racing bicycles. We maintain an inventory of about 700 bicycles and can get anything you want in stock within a week."
I would also probably make it a minimally valid HTML page. But other than that, perfect.