Dart Controls: Overall Rating 82%
www.dartcontrols.com
At first blush, this site might seem a little light, likely a trick of the eye sort of perception triggered by the homepage that seems pretty basic. Product drilldown takes a few clicks, justifiably, and each product’s page presents a brief, general description along with a chart of submodels and their differences. Each product page that we checked also includes links for both specifications and manuals. Specs, dimensional drawings, and (as appropriate) connection diagrams are included in PDFs, and those PDFs are particularly sharp and well done—not the typically blurry, grainy, seemingly scanned PDFs that so many other sites present. If you’re looking for enough information to make an informed purchasing decision, you’re in the right place. Included application notes (click Literature) are helpful. Several areas could use improvement, however, including the addition of online shopping, whitepapers, case studies, CAD drawings, and product configurators. With a bit of catching up, this one could be a winner.
- Homepage makeover and related appearance updates would kick this one up a few notches.
- Search engine works very well and nicely narrows results by more specific key terms. They should all work like this, but often don’t.
- Some areas (such as the lack of CAD drawings and application stories) could be quite easily added, and the payoff to site visitors would be worth considerably more than the up-front effort required.