Canadian Tire Website Critique

Disclosure: Millennium River is an independent website that uses hyperlinks. Some of these links are affiliate links. When you click and purchase a product(s) through these links, I may earn a commission on qualifying sales. This is done at no extra expense to you. You may also support this website via PayPal. Unless it is clearly stated, the content is not sponsored.

Additional Notice

This full website critique was not endorsed by Canadian Tire in any way. It was solely done for a portfolio project, with the other two being Royal Bank of Canada and Havelaar Canada (coming soon). If you are reading this and want a full critique of your website that will look just like this, you will need to message me. From there the cost, details, and other bits will be discussed. For the sake of this critique, I will be writing it towards Stephen Wetmore as if he were a buyer, who had purchased the full website critique service from Millennium Creek.

First Impressions

I entered your website from the main English URL http://www.canadiantire.ca/en.html The first thing I noticed from the top of my screen is your Canadian Tire logo, a big search bar, the catalogue, log in, and so forth. Below all of this is where you have your advertisements for the latest sales and goods. Further below that are many links to pages for things like your social media, About Us and more. Judging from this page alone, I like the way the website looks, and how its very focused on the ease of navigation. But is it really as good as it looks? The only way to find out is by critiquing your website through my usual areas of critique.

Navigation

After scrolling through several pages to look for lag and instability, I did not run into those problems. I clicked on Automotive, Tools & Hardware, Home & Essentials, and plenty of others to see how consistent it is throughout. Consistency, and ease of navigation are clearly some of the biggest strengths on your website. Pages loaded quickly, scrolling was not disabled, nor does it behave unpredictably. Your symbols, icons, photos and graphics intended for navigation, appear to work as intended. Speaking of icons, your Canadian Tire logo takes users right back to the home page, similarly to another website I critiqued. Unlike that website, your logo, as well as the search bar, is almost always present. Almost everywhere I went, they were atop the screen. Now while some might argue that it takes up screen estate, which it does, it is very minimal. With this in place, it makes it impossible to get lost on the website. Searching for whatever you want is also a breeze because of this.

Opening tabs was easy, and there were no pop-ups related to spam, scam or bribery. My verdict on navigation? Excellent, thanks to the speed, consistency and presence of things.

Content

When judging the content and value of your website, there were a number of things I considered: the first was relevancy. I see that your website is the online version of your physical retail store. Therefore, all the departments that exist in the physical store, must be present on the online version. Were they? Yes, they were thankfully present. Seeing that your store has the option for purchase and pickup, it would have been such a horrible lie and inconvenience not to. Hovering my mouse over the departments revealed all the other sub-departments of each category. Home & Essentials, Storage & Organization and then Storage Bins is an example of this. Because your website boasts more than 100,000 items, checking the visuals and accuracy for each and every one of them, is not feasible. But based on the items that I did check, they appear to be visually accurate. I did not see a picture of strawberries, when I was looking at vacuums, for instance.

Because the website is very large, screening all texts for grammatical and spelling errors, would be a painstaking process. To get the general idea of how good your website’s grammar is, I decided to look at your About Us page, alongside a few others. After all, that is one of the most important pages. Had it been littered with slang and poorly constructed sentences, it would probably send customers somewhere else.

No third party advertisements were present. Not that they are bad, but I always check for this to make sure that they are not too big, too numerous, whether they have sound or not, and if they are a security risk. Speaking of security, did I find any security flaws during my time here? How do customers know if they can really feel safe shopping through your online retailer? Firstly, it helps that your store is a large, nationally recognized retailer in Canada. Secondly, I noticed that you not only have a Privacy Policy on the website, but also a Privacy Charter. I also attempted to sign-on as if I had an account, and the green lock appeared confirming the certificate of the website.

When was this website last updated? Even though it looks modern and fresh, I have not been able to find a “last updated on xxxx” or “1922 – 2018” anywhere on the main page of the website. Despite this, my final verdict for the content of this website is very good. It is very content rich, accurate, secure and serves its purpose as a general retail online store.

User Acknowledgement, Satisfaction and Contact

Being a business that sells products, this means that you obviously deal extensively  with customers. Do you really have good acknowledgement, satisfaction and contact on your website, though? Towards the bottom of the website there is a Support section present. Underneath this section Customer Service, Order Status, Returns, Product Recalls, Safety Data Sheets, and Canadian Tire Flyer Delivery can be found with further information of each specific category of support. Clicking on Customer Service reveals Contact Us with the details on which numbers or address to use.

You also have most of your social media accounts present on the website, save for your Instagram which is notably missing. Considering the sheer popularity of this platform, I highly recommend putting up the icon for it. You have a big following, the coveted verified logo, and over 1,000 posts, making it seem even stranger why it is not present. Judging from the presence of all the areas you have dedicated to customer support, your user acknowledgement and contact looks very solid. As for how good your offline service is, that is something that I will not go into, because this review is focused on your online shop. If I must touch on it briefly, the results suggest high variability depending on which website consumers are reading the reviews from. Some will feature mostly positive reviews, while others are more negative.

My verdict? Your user acknowledgment, satisfaction and contact look areas look good.

Findability

Being a retail company with a long history in Canada, your name is highly recognizable in the country. Is the same true for search engines, though? To find out, I searched “Canadian Tire” in Google, Bing, Yahoo, Ask and AOL. I should also make a disclaimer that I accessed these search engines from the Opera browser. This is in case anyone finds some things missing or present, that I did not notice.

Google Search

Results came up easily and plentifully. Your profiles, Google Maps of nearby locations, and even similar companies appeared in the side bar.

Bing

Similarly to Google Search, results were plentiful and a map was present. A notable difference was the lack of social media and related companies.

Yahoo Search

Results to the main page and other parts of the website came up easily and plentifully. Unlike the other two which had a map, and/or profiles, this search engine shows the stock for your company instead. An interesting touch.

Ask

Unlike Google, Bing and Yahoo which had the very first result linking to your main page, Ask has a link to the Wikipedia article on Canadian Tire as the first result. Not a serious problem, because the main page appears within the first page. This search engine is set up to be question-and-answer geared after all.

Aol.

Very similar to Yahoo Search in that it did not show any maps or profiles. Instead, it had the results and stock information. The stock appears first, however.

Final Verdict For Search Engines

Across all five of these search engines, your website was extremely easy to find. Specifically, I such stress that the link to the main page of your website was accessible in the first or second results of all of them.

Browser Compatibility

For this part of the critique, I browsed some pages in three desktop browsers, and one mobile browser on iOS 11.

Google Chrome

Google Chrome often touts itself on how fast it is, especially when it comes onto media playback. Thankfully, it did live up to those claims based on my experience with it. The pages loaded quickly, as did any videos and maps on your website.

Microsoft Edge

This browsers boasts about how resource and power efficient it is, especially when compared to Google Chrome. While I did not perform any tests to confirm power efficiency, I did test your website’s pages in it. I clicked moderately, and rapidly across pages to see if it would freeze or bog down. For the most part, its speeds are comparable to Google Chrome. The video playback is unfortunately behind in performance.

Opera Browser

Opera is the browser I have been using the most since 2017. As such, I have spent most of my time on your website with it. The speed of the pages loading, was fast and reliable. Video playback was also phenomenal.

Safari

Opening and navigating pages through your website within this browser was responsive. It was not quite as fast as the desktop browsers, but still capable. iOS users using this browser should have no problems shopping through it. Their speed might vary depending on how old their device is. Mine was a 2015 year phone for reference. The 2017 and 2018 models should be even faster.

Final Verdict For Browsers

All of the browsers here tested, did well, with Google Chrome and Opera being the fastest. I have no idea whether your website was optimized for these two, or if it is just my computer and network speeds. Either way, users cannot go wrong with the mainstream browsers that are being regularly updated.

My Final Thoughts and Summary

Mister Wetmore, it is now time for the part of this critique where I must draw a final conclusion for your website. It should come as no surprise that I think your website is well designed. It is secure, has plenty of pages dedicated to customer support, loads fast, and finding products is very easy. Continue to keep your website up to par, if you wish for customers to not only shop in-store, but also online.

Royal Bank of Canada Website Critique

Disclosure: Millennium River is an independent website that uses hyperlinks. Some of these links are affiliate links. When you click and purchase a product(s) through these links, I may earn a commission on qualifying sales. This is done at no extra expense to you. You may also support this website via PayPal. Unless it is clearly stated, the content is not sponsored.

Notice

This full website critique was not endorsed the Royal Bank of Canada (RBC) in any way. It was solely done for a portfolio project, with the other two being Canadian Tire and Havelaar Canada. This critique was originally written on May 05, 2016. Though it still carries the original story from 2016, it has been polished and reworked in some areas to meet the personal standards of Millennium Creek in 2018.

If you are reading this, and want a full review of your website that will look just like this, you will need to message me. From there the cost, details, and other bits will be discussed. Finally, for the sake of this critique, I will be writing it towards David McKay as if he were a buyer, who had purchased one of my services.

First Impressions

Upon entering the website from the http://www.rbcroyalbank.com/personal.html URL, I can say that your website looks tidy, organized and modern. The blue, yellow and white colour scheme is proudly reflected all over the page. The logo, banking sections and finance related tools, make it very clear that this website is all about financial services. Judging from this page alone, I can say that my impressions for this website are very good so far. I hope that I will be able to say the same thing, once I am finished browsing through the other areas of your website.

Navigation

After browsing through many pages of RBC, I can say that the website feels consistent with what it was designed for. It does not take too many clicks to reach a certain area, scrolling is not automatically disabled, nor is it wonky. Your symbols, icons, photos and graphics intended for navigation, work as they should. There is no site map present from the front page of the personal banking area serving Canadian customers. There is a You are in:___ bar at the top of the page to let you know which main area of the website you are in. It does not display the exact section of the website, however. For example: when I click on bank accounts and go to savings accounts, it will not show savings accounts, but will display personal bankings instead. Thankfully, a single click on the RBC logo located near the top left corner of the screen is all it takes to get back to the main banking area of the website. Some of the areas, such as business banking, do not have the You are in: ___ present. Instead, they display a sitemap.

There are some areas, such as the portion for Caribbean customers, that do not have either readily available. I did notice a search box and advanced search options, which can help them reach areas they might be looking for faster. The toggle that allows them to switch between various Caribbean countries is convenient. The language switching option present for Canadian consumers is unavailable for them. This means that they can only explore the website in English, despite the other languages spoken in the Caribbean.

As strange as it feels to mention this, I am pleased to report that I can close tabs or navigate from any portion of your website without getting stopped by messages such as, “Are you sure you want to leave?” or “Wait! Open a TFSA with us within the next 48 hours and receive $1000!” I do not think most websites designed with professionalism in mind would have such pop-ups. Or at least, they certainly should not. It is very irritating for visitors.

Content

When judging the content and value of your website, there are a number of things I considered: the first was relevancy. Your website is about banking and finances, and all the areas reflected this. Tax-free savings accounts, chequing accounts, travel credit cards, U.S.A banking, and several others are notably present. I also looked around the website for typos and grammar errors, and it seems like they are virtually non-existent. For a website this large, it is impressive. I can imagine the effort and diligence it must have taken to get the spelling and grammar impeccable. Products and images here are also properly laid out. An example is with mortgages: when I hovered over mortgages on the first page, a dropdown menu of things pertaining to mortgages appeared. The same thing happens when I click or hover over other topics such as advice, bank accounts, locators and all the other listed services or products.

I did not notice any third party advertisements on the website’s pages, which is excellent. I understand that some website owners use them for a source of income. However, they can be very distracting, annoying, cause pages to load slowly, or freeze depending on the number of them present and running. I did not notice any “last updated on xxxx” on your website’s pages. I did notice that you have a Media Newsroom area where all the news and updates go. I also noticed the Royal Bank of Canada Website, © 1995-2016 at the bottom of the page that lets people know the website is still in operation. PDF files were not too easy for me to find, though I managed to find some in the Personal Banking & Savings Accounts and Newsletters areas.

I did not see any security certificates or badges shown on the main page. Not that they necessarily make a website more secure or legitimate. I did notice an informative Privacy & Security section that mentions how you keep your customers safe. I also attempted to log in as if I were a customer, and the green lock (along with https: turning green) appeared. This proves that the connection to the website is secured. A very great peace of mind for customers, as it would be dangerous to manage sensitive financial information on an insecure server.

User Acknowledgement, Satisfaction and Contact

Given that your website deals extensively with customer service, it is important to look at how well RBC identifies and helps its customers. The first thing that I should mention, is that there is a Contact Us link present. One would assume that this a no-brainer that all websites would have. Sadly, I have been to websites where it was either absent or hard to find. Glad that is not the case with yours. I also see that the Canadian portion has a ribbon at the bottom of the website, linking customers to your website’s Facebook, Twitter, YouTube and LinkedIn page. This is a great way to allow people to further connect, watch, follow, keep updated, or comment on RBC. The same ribbon also has a search/ask bar with a toggle that displays the top ten frequently asked questions. And finally, I can see that the advice section offers an extensive amount of resources to help people deal with business advice, home ownership, investments and more to show what RBC can do to help people.

Findability

Finding your website was very easy, since the name is searched frequently and is widely recognized on North American servers. Figuring out what the main URL to the website is was a bit of a mystery at first. It seems like it will vary depending on what location the severs detect, which had me initially think that the main link is http://www.rbcroyalbank.com/personal.html when it is really supposed to be http://www.rbc.com/canada.html? I will not consider this a flaw, because of the way your website was designed to bring up results based on location, or even the search engines people use. Speaking of search engines and results, I tested the word “RBC” in the search engines of Google, Yahoo, Bing, Ask and AOL to see what would come up on the first page. Google, Yahoo and Bing had plenty of direct results, while Ask’s advertisement-cluttered front page did show links to your website, but made it harder to reach. AOL fared well like the others, though it interestingly assumed I was accessing RBC from an American location.

Browser Compatibility

For this part of the critique, I browsed some pages in a few desktop and BlackBerry 10 browsers to get a feel for the user interface and fluidity of your website.

Google Chrome

Chrome is the main browser I personally use on a day-to-day basis. It has also been the main browser I used to browse your website. It is very smooth and the pages usually load rapidly. Videos and flash content also worked very well in this browser.

Microsoft Edge

Browsing and opening pages in Edge was a smooth, quick-loading experience. Videos and PDF files worked well for the most part, but there was a short quiz that crashed halfway through. Despite that, I would not consider my RBC experience with Edge bad, but it is not as good as Google Chrome. Nevertheless, It is still fast and can safely get financial transactions done.

Default BlackBerry 10 Browser

The mobile version focuses on products, services, contact and branches. These areas loaded quickly, and I did not face much issues jumping from section to section. That said, I prefer the full experience of the desktop version. It feels less cramped and fonts do not become tiny and require excessive zooming. This problem is exacerbated when the mobile version switches to desktop mode. Now I should answer an important question you would probably ask: Would I ever bank with your company from my browser, if I were a customer? Probably not very often, unless I had to make an important transaction on the road. The reason for this is almost entirely due to my personal preference of banking on my computer’s much larger screen.

Evolution Browser (Third Party Mobile Browser)

Like the default BlackBerry 10 browser, the mobile front page looks the same. Unfortunately, I do not have much good things to say about my experience with this browser. It was jumpy, failed to load certain pages, and would not even let me switch to desktop mode from the website. It also did not let me find branch locations, in comparison to the default browser, which did display the locations. The problems that occurred are largely the developer’s fault in this scenario. But, it is still important to mention third party browsing experiences since many people will sometimes use them instead of their default mobile browsers. Both of the BlackBerry 10 mobile browsers prompted me to download the mobile application. I clicked on it to take a look, but was sent to a version that is no longer available. There is a newer version in BlackBerry World that goes by the title RBC Mobile For BlackBerry 10, but because this is a web critique, as opposed to an application critique, I have not tested it. However, there were a lot of users saying that the application is grossly outdated, missing features, and that it needs be on par with the version for Android and iOS. I do not know how legitimate these claims are. If they are true, I recommend that the developer responsible for the mobile application of your website, updates or creates a modern, refreshed application built for BlackBerry OS 10.3 and newer.

My Final Thoughts and Summary

Now that I have had a solid amount of time to go over your website and critique in various areas, I can finally come to a conclusion: well done! Mister McKay, your website is solid and was truly designed with high degrees of professionalism and security in mind. I do not know how much time was dedicated into putting together such a large, polished website. What I do know is that the effort shows. Continue to keep up the good work and high quality standards, if you wish to remain successful and competitive with other banking rivals.

The Difference Between Nationality Versus Ethnicity

Disclosure: Millennium River is an independent website that uses hyperlinks. Some of these links are affiliate links. When you click and purchase a product(s) through these links, I may earn a commission on qualifying sales. This is done at no extra expense to you. You may also support this website via PayPal. Unless it is clearly stated, the content is not sponsored.

Many People

Despite expressions such as “we live in a small world” the world is truthfully a very vast place. Within it many countries exist. Many nations, people, languages, dialects, cultures and religions. From Afghanistan to Zimbabwe. Ainu to Zulu. Many people. With so much variety in the world, many terms have come about to identify and classify the numerous groups of people: race, ethnicity and nationality. While many may claim that they know the differences between all of these terms, they either mix up the definitions or have it wrong altogether. It also does not help when “race” and “ethnicity” are used interchangeable, when they in fact have different definitions. What does race, nationality, and ethnicity mean then? In this article, the definitions for all of these terms will be explored.

Nationality

When someone asks about nationality, they are asking about the country of one’s birth. In this context, nation means the following the following: a country of political independence or existence as a separate nation. With there being 195 sovereign nations in the world, this means that is possible to have one of 195 nationalities in the world. When a person is born into a certain country, that by default gives them the nationality of that nation. Even if they are not part of the dominant ethnic group living in that particular nation.

For example: two ethnic Germans from Germany go to Namibia and give birth to a male child. Even though the dominant ethnic group in Namibia is supposed to be the Ovambo people, the child’s nationality will be Namibia, because they were born on that sovereign nation’s soil. The child is obviously still a white ethnic German, because of their ancestry and genetics, but not a German national.

Defining the nationality of people from overseas territories with no complete sovereignty, can be more complicated. Taking American Samoans for example, they are classified as American nationals, by American law. However, they are not considered citizens of the United States of America, because it is not a constituent political entity of the United States. People from British Overseas Territories such as the Cayman Islands, are not classified as United Kingdom nationals. This is because they do not fall under the category of the United Kingdom law of who classifies as a United Kingdom national. There are other examples out there that can be discussed, but these examples are sufficient enough to showcase the point.

Since it is only possible to be born in one place at a time, it is not possible for one to be Nigerian, Swiss, Korean and Pakistani nationals at once. It is, however, possible to be a genetic mix of the ethnic groups from all of those countries, leading to the next point: ethnicity.

Ethnicity

There are many nationalities, but even more ethnicities. Some nations such as Canada and the United states, have over 100 ethnic groups living within them. Others like South Korea and Japan, have far fewer. An ethnic group is a category of people who identify with one another based on similarities. These similarities are a common ancestry, language, history, society, culture, genetics, physical appearance and sometimes, but not always, religion. Because these are things that take a long, unknown amount of time to acquire, it is not possible for a person to change their ethnicity. A Javanese man can move to a remote part of Togo, practice their customs, learn and speak their language. However, it would not make him an ethnic Ewe due to the Javanese genetics that have been acquired from his parents at birth, giving him a notably different physical appearance, sound and other unchangeable traits. For this reason, this is why some people treat people who are not part of the dominant ethnic group, or race in some cases, poorly. Even with a person’s best intentions to integrate and get along with the majority.

Race

Defining the meaning of race is a complicated, controversial, ever-changing matter. The reason being is that the meaning of it has changed from time to time. In fact, the definition or even existence of “races” still is not 100% agreed upon with everyone from across the world. Some people assert, “There is only one race: the human race” And some modern scholarships consider “race” nothing more than a social construct. An example with a quote from an article on The New York Times:

“Race is not biological. It is a social construct. There is no gene or cluster of genes common to all blacks or all whites. If race were “real” in the genetic sense, racial classifications for individuals would remain constant across boundaries”

What is the most standard, agreed upon definition of race? Race is a grouping of humans based on shared physical and social traits into categories that are generally viewed as distinct by society. Going by the definitions of this, this bring up the following categories: Black, Caucasian, Asiatic/Amerind and Australasian. These were originally described with words ending with “oid”. Those terms are now considered archaic and/or offensive. Looking at the black race for instance, people will usually think of people with dark skin, dark brown eyes and black afro frizzy hair, who originally came from Africa. While such a description does accurately fit most “black” people, it is also true that a number of those traits do also appear in other “races”. This supports the argument for race being a made up social construct.

It is true that all the human races are genetically the same species, Homo sapiens. It is also true that humans have scattered all around the globe millennia ago from either the Middle East or Africa, where the species originated. Since that time, populations have developed certain physical features to help them better adapt to their environment. For example: those that inhabited tropical regions, tend to have darker pigmentation in their skin to minimize damage from the sun’s ultra violet rays. On the opposite end of the spectrum, populations that inhabited colder regions, often developed paler skin. These are not changes that happened instantly, rather they happened over a long period of time.

To say that the racial classifications are not based on genetics at all, is not true. It is the genes that allow ethnic groups from within their races to be born with their usual traits. Even when they are born outside of their ancestral land. An example would be two Yoruba Nigerians giving birth to a daughter in the United Kingdom. The United Kingdom is a cold, northern region that was, and is still predominantly inhabited by various cacausian ethnic groups such as English, Welsh, Cornish, Scots and others. Now because Yoruba have lived in Africa for so long, it is coded in their DNA to give birth to individuals that will bare their usual black characteristics, even when they reproduce in an entirely different environment.

Summary

Nationality refers to the country where a person was born. Canada, Peru, Portugal, Cameroon, China and New Zealand are examples. Ethnicity refers to the cultural and ancestral identity of a person. Czech, Igbo, Han, Marathi and Inuit are examples. Defining race on the other hand, is not as simple as say a volleyball; a spherical, inflated object used for playing the namesake sport. Defining race must be done carefully, factually, and level-headedly. Not out of bias, bigotry, denial or racism.