E-commerce sites never need to be boring — though some choose to be. No matter what you’re selling, it’s possible to be visually engaging and tell an interesting story. Cowboy Electric Bikes does both — on a website that’s also well-built and easy to use.
The standard e-commerce site features a product shot carousel, followed by technical product specs. True to its name, Cowboy breaks its own trail, telling its story while walking the user through the benefits of having one of their bicycles.
The site makes use of simple parallax scrolling features and transitions to illustrate explanations of power-assisted pedaling, safety features, and the connected app.
The use of parallax is effective, bringing life to each section and the bikes.
Behind the scenes, the Cowboy website is built to a standard that impresses. Specific things we love include:
- being fully responsive and adapting well at smaller device sizes
- displaying properly in all of the latest browsers
- using HTTPS so it’s clear the site is trusted and you can provide your contact details without fear of them being intercepted
- scoring near-perfect with CSS validators like the W3C CSS Validation Service
- resolving to just one URL (https://cowboy.com), with alternate URLs forwarding correctly, and http://cowboy.com forwarding to the correct URL with both https and www
- an excellent site speed with a score of 90% in the GT Metrix tool
- passing the AChecker accessibility validator with flying colours (despite throwing a few warnings in the more comprehensive WAVE evaluation tool)
There are only a handful of things we think would make this e-bike site run even more smoothly:
- The HTML throws quite a few errors in validators like the W3C Markup Validation Service, but almost all of them are due to development choice. Most aren’t technically incorrect — just outside the norm. One error was due to a simple mistake with a language-type declaration of eu-uk, when the correct one to use is eu-gb.
- Site speed on mobile could be improved. Google’s speed test rates the site as only 45%, with the first content not being rendered for 1.7 seconds. That might not sound like a long time, but it varies depending on the quality of your data connection. Those with slower mobile data may wait even longer.
- The print stylesheet isn’t set up properly, so some pages are being cut off and other pages are printing with no content. As a result, the homepage prints across 23 pages. Printing an e-commerce site might not be something you’d expect users to do, but fixing the print style sheet wouldn’t be a big task.
- A couple of mobile-friendly issues were found in testing, using tools like mobiReady — but again, these issues are minor.
Sometimes web development can feel like an uphill climb. With everything it has going for it, Cowboy can kick their website into high-gear with just a few adjustments.