I took a tour around the U.S. recently, and it was quite a journey: Coeur d’Alene, Idaho, to Biscayne, Fla., to Norman, Okla., to Troy, Ala., to Lake Charles, La., to Des Moines, Iowa, to Milford, N.H.; to Winston-Salem, N.C.—and a few other spots in between. No, I didn’t accumulate air miles on this journey; I navigated all these locations online.
I googled “flooring retailers” in a wide range of cities across the map to gauge how companies in the biz show up in web searches, and then I clicked through to sites in each location to experience the ways web visitors are welcomed on homepages. I made a point to click on the retailers that showed up four to six spots down in search results, in addition to those that came up first. And I searched on both my laptop and iPhone to see how sites format on various devices.