Starbucks vs. Dunkin' Donuts

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• The Architect

  Starbucks and Dunkin' Donuts’ approaches to creating meaningful community around their brands and extending their companies beyond a typical retail website is as different as their stores. Both websites have menus, nutrition information, online stores, store locators and social links -- the bare necessities for brands of this nature. The similarities end there. Dunkin' Donuts' version of extending itself beyond the walls of its stores is reminiscent of old gimmicks and half-hearted community-building ploys. There's a healthy version of its menu, links to a running site, some promos and a contest, and then we’re done. Dunkin' Donuts provides no opportunity for its fans to be a part of its website in any meaningful way. Starbucks has done better in their attempts. Noteworthy is the idea of improving the company with your ideas -- something that speaks to core fans. If you love the green Starbucks splash stick, then you should know it was developed in this way. The website allows visitors to share ideas, vote on ideas submitted by others and see which ideas have received the strongest response. It promotes community by encouraging visitors to play a part in improving the brand they love through their own opinions and innovations. Second to this, there’s a blog that’s halfway worth subscribing to if you’re an ultra fan. And while it is not exactly groundbreaking, it has a genuine appeal and seems to keep a decent personal touch to it with little of the usual corporate interference on the surface. Introducing new conveniences, products and free offers allows the blog to be something worth subscribing to for core users and brand evangelists. In addition, Starbucks offers a place for those willing to contribute to their causes. It’s not terribly engaging, but having a directory of people bound to stores and allowing for conversation within each store is a worthwhile effort. It needs more work in order to truly establish the store as a gateway to the local community.

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• The Craftsman

  A website should not only be an extension of a retail store, but it should also be the gathering place for your brand's community of followers. It's important to give that community a great experience when they visit your site, and design plays an integral role in that experience. Dunkin' Donuts and Starbucks handle this experience in very different ways, and both leave much to be desired. Let's start with Dunkin' Donuts. It is quite clear that the goal of this site is to push products. The first thing that I notice is the horrible Photoshop work on the home page. It's a collage of poorly photographed and cut out cups, beans and other products. It's obvious that none of the elements ever appeared together naturally. With coffee beans the size of walnuts and cups the size of buckets, the scale is so ridiculous that the whole thing comes off as cheesy and poorly produced. There is a lot of movement and visual stimulation on the home page, including pop-up menus, enlarging images and a hot pink drop-down menu. It seems that at any moment a man wanting to guess my weight or swallow a sword could jump out from behind that burlap sack. These elements are over the top and a detriment to the functionality, as the page takes several seconds to load. The navigation is passable, but there is a lot going on. First you have the main navigation with drop-down menus. Above that you have a secondary navigation that is one of the smallest I have ever seen at only six pixels. I would think that a store finder and franchising information warrants a larger size. And above in the upper right corner there are 4 graphics that appear to be buttons but do nothing when clicked or hovered over, creating confusion. Secondary pages on the site are cleaner, but there are still some alignment and spacing problems, and an overall lack of design consistency makes the site look thrown together. While some pages look pretty good, others look quite bad. On any given page there are several fonts and many colors, causing it to look very busy. Starbucks' website is in stark contrast to the Dunkin' Donuts site. It's clean and minimalist in a way that feels great on the home page, but once you dig into the site, the pages become bland and boring. The home page immediately gives you hierarchy with a large, interactive feature that is simple to navigate. Below that are three areas that funnel traffic with a minimal navigation system. The light background helps the warm, rich imagery pop, creating terrific contrast. Nothing is in your face or obtrusive. It's subtle and functional -- just what you'd expect from a brand like Starbucks. The secondary pages aren't nearly as strong as the home page. The primary and secondary navigation are minimal to the point of being boring. The leading on the navigation and body text is tight and should be expanded. The subtle drop shadow on the top of the canvas area makes that area appear as a frame and does nothing to enhance the page. Columns are narrow, and content feels cramped. There is wasted real estate under a poorly designed search bar which features a "go" button -- none of which feels like what you would expect from Starbucks. There is also a lot of inconsistency from page to page, especially in the way their products and offerings are displayed, which makes the browsing experience feel disjointed. Both sites have work to be done and leave me feeling disappointed. I expect better from these two captains of the coffee industry. While Dunkin' Donuts is over the top with its bright colors and flashy animation, Starbucks doesn't go far enough with its neutral colors and boring framework. Like a cup of coffee that's too strong or too weak, these sites need to find the perfect brew.

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• The Developer

  Anyone who has studied the metrics on their own website knows that getting people past the front page is a big deal, getting them to stay longer is even a bigger deal, and having someone feel that your site is worthwhile enough to come back is the ultimate score. Today's websites are as much about visitors consuming information, collaborating and interacting as a community as they are about selling a product or service.Interestingly, when comparing Dunkin' Donuts to Starbucks, it is clear that both companies have attempted to make their sites into something more than just a reproduction of their retail storefronts. They both have used various methods to try to capitalize on the enthusiasm of their customers. Dunkin' Donuts offers a feature that allows you to create your own donut, while Starbucks has launched a number of social websites that range from promoting specific product lines to advocating social change to soliciting suggestions to make your Starbucks better. Overall, Starbucks does a better job of providing compelling reasons to visit the site. However, both make the perplexing mistake of burying the content rather than bringing it to the forefront. Dunkin' buries these nuggets in favor of button graphics and forces visitors to hunt to find something interesting. Starbucks hides a single text link for each of their social sites below their Flash movie that gets in the way of finding something more useful. Both companies have very active Facebook pages with posts happening every few minutes -- not that you would know this by looking at the front page of their site. What's that you say? The goal is to sell product? Well, I have a question in return: Isn't it necessary to drive traffic to your site in order to sell products online? If there are 4.5 million fans on Starbucks' Facebook page posting every couple of minutes, you do the math. I'll just hold off on returning to these websites until either company gives me a reason to.

Seven Sure-Fire SEO Killers

So you have your website and you’re trying to sell your product or service. That’s great. Now you desire to get some great page ranking. That’s even better! But the problem sets in when you realize you essentially have to remake your entire site because you did some things that are completely detrimental to your search engine optimization health. What are those things?

1. Text in graphics

What happens here is most times someone falls in love with a super neat font, or perhaps you don’t know much about creating a decent layout, so you just decide you want to put some information in a picture and call it a day. I totally get it’ it’s really easy, hassle-free and gets the job done, but what many fail to realize is this is absolutely killing your search engine optimization.

The problem here is not just that it’s a horrible idea, but the way search engines work and the way you are choosing to display information just does not work together. See, search engines pretty much scan your website text to see what it is your website is about. Unfortunately, search engines cannot scan pictures and figure out what it is you are talking about. This technique is fine, of course, if you’re not saying much but if you get in the habit of creating pictures with paragraphs of text on them (or even important headers), this is a bad idea.

2. Unfriendly file names

Every website needs to have some pictures. People love to visit a site and have something to visualize. However, when using pictures, you have to save your file names so that they make sense. Far too often, you may have a graphic or a picture file name that just looks like a bunch of mumbo jumbo or isn’t really descriptive at all (i.e., “picture1.jpg”).

What you must understand is that friendly file names can actually help your SEO if you give it a fairly descriptive name. Of course you don’t want to overdo it (many say 45-60 characters is more than enough), but if it’s a picture of your product, the file name should reflect that.

3. Unfriendly URL’s

The previously mentioned principle remains the same for this concept. Sometimes people rarely take the time to actually name their inside pages. I’ve literally seen people with urls that are ‘www.mywebsite.com/insidepage2.html’ or ‘www.mywebsite.com/ab-co-XY1.php’. That’s not really helping you. Again, you want to make your url as simply descriptive as you can--nothing too long but concise and makes sense. If this your ‘About’ page, then name it that.

Also keep in mind, if you are using a content management system or blogging platform you want to make sure you have your friendly URLs turned on so they don’t look like a bunch of cryptic code.

4. Ignoring image “alt” tags

The reason you don’t have to be overly descriptive in your image file name is because you can do that by using the ‘alt’ tag. This tag pretty gives you an opportunity to describe what’s in the picture and what it’s supposed to do. Keep in mind many of our current search engines have the ability to search specifically for images. Friendly file names and good alt descriptions can make it realtively easy for your product or service picture to show up in an image search. Try to take advantage of this by utilizing this task.

It also helps with your regular SEO, because the search engine typically takes some of that into consideration when coming up with the relevancy of your website to a search query.

5. Splash pages

Honestly, in 2012, if it isn’t absolutely necessary, just avoid them. I know sometimes they are cool and sometimes it’s really nice to have something introduce your website, but if it isn’t absolutely necessary in the scheme of things, just let it go. The reason is because search engines take into account what is said on your very first page (index) when scanning your site. Most splash pages are just videos or pictures of some sort. If there’s absolutely nothing of use on it, then your site won’t rank very well.

6. Meta keywords

When creating and coding your site there is sometimes a little ‘meta’ tag that people like to put a bunch of keywords in to to try to give your page a better chance of getting a higher ranking. To be quite frank, this tag pretty much is useless now. Many search engines don’t use it as heavily weighted to determine the relevancy of your website to a query. Many years ago this may have been a factor but as of now, it isn’t really worth it.

7. Overdoing keyword density

You may have heard that you need to sprinkle your keywords all over your website or you need to make sure that at some point you refer back to your keywords some way or another. It’s definitely a good thing to keep in mind -- of course you want all your content to be as relevant as possible. But search engines are starting to take into account your keyword usage and density when determining how good your website is to a query. If you sprinkle your keywords around too much, there’s a chance a search engine can determine that you are spam site and are therefore irrelevant to any query.

This is one of those techniques that you have to be careful with because it is necessary but you cannot overdo it. The best bet is just to use a bit of common sense and try not to pile the keywords on.