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Website Of The Week – Sainsbury’s

For some reason Sainsbury’s has decided to adopt a minty green theme for its Website, despite the fact that everyone associates the supermarket with the colour orange (don’t forget your brand values, guys). Nevertheless the minty green is calming, if a little insipid, and the green and blue typeface is clear and effective. It is remarkably uncluttered with a manageable number of links on the homepage (compared to some sites which are a myriad of whirling images, duplicated links and trillions of sections – well almost). Sainsbury’s, however, is nice and clear. Splendid.
So, the Sainsbury’s site is visual pleasing, but what about content? Well, as you’d expect from a supermarket, what you’ve basically got is food and how to cook it. The recipes section is particularly good allowing you to choose across a number of criteria what kind of meal you wish to cook; ingredients and geographic origin can both used to search for new dishes. Once a recipe has been selected all the ingredients used in it also act as links to a page on the history and use of that particular food. So, you can brush up on your culinary knowledge as well as prepare a delightful meal.
The site also has a substantial amount of nutritional information for people who have special dietary needs. A section on eating during and after pregnancy as well as diabetic diets and various ‘something-free’ diets (nut-free, gluten-free and so on), all allow for a comprehensive guide to eating well. Users can also order things like wine, chocolates and flowers as gifts directly from the site.
On a commercial and business level, the ‘Fresh News’ section gives access to all the company’s press releases and is archived back to the beginning of 1995. There’s also ‘Fresh Ideas’ area which keeps you abreast with Sainsbury’s spin-off projects (Sainsbury’s banking, and a Reward Card holder Pet Club, for example).
The main gripe with the site is, I’m afraid, a technical one. For some reason the design of the site is such that each time a link is clicked the entire page is reloaded from scratch; each link has to be downloaded again, as do all the graphics. Placing the information in a central frame should prevent this and speed up navigation around the various sections; at present it can be laboriously slow. Still, it makes you hungry.