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Miracle-Gro
green thumbs up
July 11, 2005
Founded in 1951, Miracle Gro grew from the post-WWII explosion of the suburban lifestyle to become a household name in gardening. A merger in 1995 created Scotts Miracle-Gro, which has since become a worldwide giant in the lawn and garden industry.
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Visitors to www.MiracleGro.com are welcomed with a rather talkative Flash-based video. The designers have graciously included a mute button, which we suggest you engage if you try this at the office. The color palette and flat texture of the homepage is reminiscent of the packaging of Miracle-Gro fertilizers that line up on the shelves of your neighborhood plant shed. This homepage is organized as a portal, leading to a range of useful and promotional information targeted at the weekend gardener.
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In terms of usability, the site is conservatively organized, with the navigation menu on the left side and the main departments—lawn care, gardening, and problem solving—at the top. The menu covers "how to," videos, gardening projects (e.g., planting, pruning), tools, common problems (e.g., disease control), a discussion forum, and so on. It is sober but effective.
The site is the online equivalent of a cable-television infomercial. It explains the use of Miracle-Gro products in context and by region or soil type. The site offers to help with personalized care in exchange for a few details from the viewer (a clever marketing technique to build a relationship with the consumer). Green thumbs will probably enjoy browsing these pages for hours.
Although the graphic design looks outdated, the overall impression is well aligned with the positioning that other contact points, such as the packaging and gardening catalogs, convey to the customer.
On the architecture end, however, this site suffers from a few landscaping issues. Clicking on About Us in the Miracle-Gro site links directly to the corporate parent Scotts Miracle-Gro, and leaves the user no option to get back to Miracle-Gro.
What's more, the domain names on links off the main menu are growing every which way. A click on How To links to Gardening.MiracleGro.com while Lawncare switches to the completely generic GardenAdvice.com. This is especially worrisome because these other pages look like the Miracle-Gro site but lack the logo or mention of Miracle-Gro in the text. How on earth, we wonder, did the web developer get away with leaving the company's logo off the site?
These are no small issues; they are enough to reflect a need for someone to thoroughly weed through the site with an eye toward perfection. Otherwise, this is a good site with lots of growth potential.
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*Due to the constantly changing environment of websites, some reviews may no longer reflect the current website for this brand.
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