At the time in which Polar first designed their web site (around 2011), product development was pretty stagnant. This changed when the first line of limited edition flavors came out in 2014, and since then new flavors have been appearing once (if not more) every six months. At some point, Polar realized that their newly created products needed a place on the web, but due to the state of the company’s site (which saw no maintenance), their main webpage was not the place for them.
Instead, WordPress sites were created for EVERY SINGLE sub-category in the brand, subsequently dividing the product line across the web and across social medial channels. Unfortunately, the company page was never updated to link to any of the sub-category pages, nor do those pages link back to a main homepage. I truly believe that this is bad for the overall brand. There was an opportunity for the more popular subcategories (that receive higher amounts of traffic) to link back to other sub-categories for increased visibility. Unfortunately, the company does not share this sentiment.
Pages that currently exist:
http://www.polarseltzerade.com
Presently, neither the main company page nor any of the sub-pages include the ability for online ordering, product locators, detailed ingredient information, or many other standard pages on similar webpages. These are crucial elements to implement if Polar wants to keep up with online trends. Less imperative but equally as important is to create an area for employees to be able to log in to see their benefits or access their web mail – this would cut down on the number of links and log-ins required to access this information.
I believe that a redesign would be an opportunity to re-unite the company’s product portfolio under its flagship brand and provide consumers with detailed information about the company and an opportunity to search out product in their area. This would also allow certain redundancies to be eliminated on each sub-site and render them on the main webpage.