Firearms Industry Websites

[wfrazee]

Why oh why do firearms manufacturers have to have websites that look like ass?

Really. I have gone to almost every manufacturer of handgun that I could think of today and a scant couple have websites that I would be proud to put my name to as a web developer. Alot of these companies are well established and from the amount of advertising they do in industry publications, its not like they cant apply a fraction of the advertising and market development budgets to rebuilding the site...

Is it the standard lack of impetus for change? If so, then I would speak to that and say that online information searching and lookup, while not AS critical in the gun sector compared to normal retail channels, is on the rise and a large number of people are looking for information on the web.

Specific sites on my list of "Ass of the Firearms Internet" include:

Springfield Armory
This site design was ok around the turn of the millenium however springfield now offers products, services, and an online store. The real information that people are looking for are often buried two and three levels deep in the site. Those running at higher resolutions are boxed to a small website and treated to huge amounts of wasted space around the solid site frame. Springfield fails to make a dynamic presence and often uses flash and images to convey content which could very easily be done with CSS-applied text and a much smaller background image. So much more information could be conveyed in a much better organization were springfield to re-design the website with the current and future needs of the internet-browsing gun owner and purchaser in mind.

Glock
Ye gads. This is a site that I could have done as a freshman in high school back in the days of Netscape 2 during the real development of the internet. Glock has expanded to become a huge player in the firearms industry but the site has not grown along the same lines. Glock offers minimal information in a minimal format which while loading quickly offers almost no real "hard" information for the shooting enthusiast interested in their products. The new knife "section" is even worse without any ability to get larger images, find out about the knife product lines, or even look for distributors.

STI
STI is a fairly new entry to the firearms market... all the more reason why a new website should be a priority. In this case, they have hired kevin j solito to do thier web work and frankly, I wouldnt hire the guy to do my laundry considering his skills list on his own site. STI could use a more complex site design which better befits the image of a custom and semi-custom pistolmaker on the edge of technology. Fast access to product information is unavailible, the index page is a hodgepodge of bits and pieces includeing an out-of-place survey which takes up prime index-presence real-estate. STI needs to host on a faster server as current load times are slow even right now at an off-peak time. While off-site hosting may cost a little bit more over time, you are guarenteed a much higher quality of service doing either colo or a dedicated server at , say, EV1Servers, making use of multihomed connections with multiple gigabit providers. I would submit the cost of a dedicated hosting solution would not be much more (and possibly less) than what you are paying Kevin to do the site for now anyway. Further, STI should NEVER be using an off-site shopping cart. Shopping carts are easy to use and integrate into a web design. Get a certificate from thawte, enroll in an e-privacy verification program, and then keep your shopping cart local. You are then not sharing client data with a third party shopping cart host, and you have the possibility to integrate shopping cart function with STI order fullfillment systems. Lastly, open guestbooks on a corporate site is unprofessional, particularly when you consider what someone could enter and have end up on your site.

Kahr Arms
First of all the splash page is useless. it conveys no information to the end user. The non-kahr.com links are innane and should be germane to the normal template, SUPPORTING the rest of the site, not competing with it. As for the actual setup and template itself, the design is FAR out of date with a low contrast color scheme that make it hard to read from the get-go. Frankly, the information provided is great. Plenty of info on the gun lines, news section, etc, etc. Alot of the key to getting and keeping the end user is presentation. Make it easy to read, make it look nice, impart that professional feel. Kahr.com just doesnt do any of that.

Colt
Useless splash page. These three sections should really all be subsections of the same site probably with subtle template variations to cater to the specific audiences. The sites themselves are somewhat of a mess with pixellated and broken images everywhere. Even the site design itself is dated, boxy, and not really professional when you compare it with some of Colt's competitors. Without the images working, you can say little else. A non-working site is FAR worse than a badly done, hard-to-navigate site.

Those sites which are not quite the "Ass of the Web" but which I have more than $.02 on anyway:

HK-USA
HK splits up the american website into 3 separate mini-sites via a static image presentation at access time. These sites should rather be sections of the same site with a more extensive integrated navigation system. Once you access the firearms section, the framing is rather nice and professional, keeping the look and feel of the HK site however the navigation is very simple requiring multiple navigation clicks to get to information about any particular product.

Kimber America
While the site template is excellent, Kimber needs to learn to break content down into a set of pages instead of relying on anchors within monster pages. Specific products should each have thier own page! This helps load times, helps organize information, keeps reader confusion and clutter to a minimum, which all helps the end-user focus on your product line, assumably your ROI for investing in having a website in the first place.

Ruger
The ruger index splash is a bit heavy in terms of load time and considering the links that it points to are all part of the same site anyway may be better served by using the format that you have for "Ruger Handguns" to be the entry page. Corporate and other links can then be followed from that page. Firearms are ruger's primary business, yes? Then concentrate on it. Make that what the end user sees immediately and often. Make that what is easiest to access to learn about.

Sites that I particularly like:

SureFire
Clean, professional design that offers information on a multitude of surefire products. They could make a bigger deal about some of thier side work such as the Combat Tactics magazine but overall a nice site.

CZ-USA
Simple but clean and interactive.

Smith and Wesson
Loads slow but clean template design with rapid information access including specific products and all manner of corporate and product info. May want to consider a PHP Accelerator or use of the Zend platform to secure and speed up PHP-based website access.

Sigarms
Clean, interactive, easy access to information. Its a professional site with a solid feel to it. Product and corporate information is easily accessible to the end user and secondary product lines are easily integrated with the site including store access features.

I am sure that I have overlooked a couple to comment on but its 2324 local time and im starting to get tired. This is something that has been bothering me for some time and even if no one really takes the time to truly notice and care, at least its off my chest.

And, no, i have never been opinionated.

[[TASF]Maverick]

hahaha I do believe you left out Kel-Tec

[therooster]

nice little write-up... but i dont have problems with any of their websites.

[mr0w1]

http://www.mkssupply.com/news/news.asp?ID=4

How about Hi-Point's flashback to 1997? The only one I have a slight disagreement with you is S&W -- the ability to find guns only by caliber or model number is a bit annoying, as they have one really strange model numbering system. All the same, it's still one of the better sites.

I actually, about 2 months ago, almost posted this exact same thing, but I didn't (I'm not sure why...maybe I thought it wasn't that important, maybe I saw something else that caught my atten....

[NeoCon]

wfrazee, I totally agree with you. Bad websites are very unprofessional.
The only reason to have a bad website, and its a pretty bad reason at that, is if you have not yet moved your business out of your garage.

I'd say a company's website is the first place potential customers go for a sales pitch. If there isn't any information the customer will move on. Furthermore the company's website is probably the first stop for customer service.

[JimLongley]

You forgot this one: http://www.amderringer.com/ladyd.html

[mr0w1]

Originally Posted by NeoCon

The only reason to have a bad website, and [b]its a pretty bad reason at that[b] (emphasis added), is if you have not yet moved your business out of your garage.

Websites don't take up space. I think that many of these companies just aren't trying. The don't care. They've got name brand recognition, and in the past, before the internet, that'd sell a gun. I don't think many of the realize that their website says as much or more about them now than their name does. Case in point, the Glock and the XD -- Glock's website sucks, SA's doesn't suck as much. When someone who doesn't know much about firearms history (reputation, origins, etc.), they rely on the public image of the company, and that is nowadays, their website.


And Jim, thanks a lot. I needed my retinas burned like that.

[wfrazee]

Originally Posted by JimLongley

You forgot this one: http://www.amderringer.com/ladyd.html

Holy crap, a good thing I did. I think i probably would have had a heart attack had I had to tackle this one last night. Its bad enough trying to navigate some of the sites I DID go to.

Ammo manufacturers and firearms training academies are just as bad, many of them, unfortunately.

I swear, its like these guys dont even know to call a good webmaster. I can understand not having a guy in-house to handle your website on a dedicated basis. I can even understand your IT guys not being good enough to really do much with your website. But there are great design firms out there, and then there are GOOD freelance web guys out there (like me *toot* *toot*). IN this day and age with as much as there is out there to offer, you have to wonder what business reason these companies could possibly have for not working on redesigning existing sites or building new ones to better reach the increasingly online customer base.

[mr0w1]

Oh. I think Bushmaster deserves a mention. Their site is not unbearable, but very obnoxious. Their little flashing "New" image is bad bad bad.

What they've done is taken modern (albeit, mostly useless) Flash technology and recreated exactly the effect that a .gif would have given you, just like back in the old school days of the net.

Rule of thumb: If it flashes, don't put it on a website. Unless it's a girl. Then it's okay.

[wfrazee]

Originally Posted by NeoCon

The only reason to have a bad website, and its a pretty bad reason at that, is if you have not yet moved your business out of your garage.

Actually that is the BEST reason to have a good website! I will give you a personal example. I currently run three websites on a personal basis:

http://www.waynefrazee.com
http://www.aeronte.com
http://www.wynweb.net

One is a personal site the other two are more-or-less commercial ventures in association with Amazon.com. None of these sites took me longer than two and a half weeks to build initially. True, every once in a while they get a tune up to keep systems current and so forth, but in general the sites are quick to build.

Small companies need strong sites and aggressive advertisement of them to build an online presence even more than the large companies do. As a small company it is that much more important to make sure your web presence looks professional and has that large company feel to compensate for the fact that you may not have the most established brick and mortar business.