The Tea Chest, a South African-based tea brand, offers a well-organized website that follows a user-centric layout. While a floating menu ensured I was always a click away from essential pages, including the "Contact" and "About Us" pages, I particularly enjoyed the quick access to a convenient search bar and a trackable shopping bag.
From the home page, I could easily shop for teas by category, tea type, and product type, while the blog's engaging heading invited me to explore further. Plus, I found the news section informative, and the brand's social media icons are prominently highlighted, making it easy to stay connected.
The website appears airy and well-organized, especially on desktop screens, where the images of packaged teas and hover-activated selections truly come to life. In addition, the parallax scrolling effect on certain images adds a touch of dynamism that's more noticeable on the desktop site.
However, I found that the main menu commands considerable visual space at the top of the home page, causing the hero image to lose some of its impact. On PageSpeed Insights, the desktop site scored 76/100 for accessibility and 71/100 for overall performance.
In contrast to the desktop site, I found that the mobile version's floating main menu commanded less visual space, allowing the hero image to take center stage. However, much like the desktop site, the words in the hero image still fail to stand out. That said, navigating the website was a breeze, especially with the addition of a convenient back-to-top button, which felt more useful on the mobile site.
Despite my pleasant experience, the mobile site scored relatively low on PageSpeed Insights, with a performance rating of just 37/100. However, it received a high accessibility score of 77/100 and a perfect 100/100 for best practices.