How Much Can You Get for a £60m Website Re-Design?

B&Q (a large UK home improvement retailer) has just released its new website re-design: http://www.diy.com/

The cost?

…

£60m!

So what exactly does a £60m site get you? eConsultancy interviewed their Director and found that along with the site re-design they also launched an upgrade to their back-end systems.

But let’s take a closer look at the re-design improvements:

 

Mega Menu

One of the biggest changes was how they structure their mega menu. Below you can see the old and new style.

Old Menu

New Menu

The new design focuses on the types of rooms and the products themselves instead of by department.

They use a hamburger menu for the mobile site, and still do a relatively good job considering the size of the mega menu. Although they could of used some of the homepage real estate rather than keeping the carousel.

 

Search

B&Q have introduced a larger search bar and also predictive searching. The results return not only related keywords but also products including the price.

The Search results page is clean and includes availability options and reviews clearly presented without having to click through to the product.

Impressively they have implemented a compare function which allows users to compare up to 4 products at a glance, side by side.  

Product Page

For £60m it would be expected that B&Q would invest a lot of money in their product imagery, but some pages only have one image per item. They do however, put a lot of effort into their Help and Advice tab with videos and instructions for installation.

Checkout

The Click and Collect confirmation takes users to an upsell page of related products while asking if they want to proceed to the checkout or continue shopping.

 

Unfortunately they don’t offer a guest checkout option but they do display their checkout pages well. The inclusion of a progress bar, order summary and postcode lookup make for a better user experience.

The only page I would remove is the Review page, as the inclusion of an Order Summary throughout the checkout makes this unnecessary and just adds an extra step.

In conclusion it is a massive improvement from their existing website design. A lot of work has gone into the Search and the Mega Menu which is essential for a site of this size.

Clearly the £60m would have also been spent on the upgrade to the back-end systems and marketing for the new site, but it’s still a lot of money for a new website. It's likely that more user testing will be carried out now that the site has launched and conversion improvement work will be ongoing.