Scroll-stop teardown
Ernie Ball Music ManThe homepage
What it's trying to do
The homepage is a storefront for a company that is also a piece of California manufacturing history. Its job is to move strings, and it does that well. Everything on the page is arranged around the buy, which is a defensible choice when strings are the volume business.
What works
The nav does real work. Strings splits into electric, acoustic and bass, then hands anyone who doesn't know what they want a link called String Explorer. That's a menu making a decision instead of listing inventory.
The FAQ is the other one. It explains why the company won't publish string tension numbers, and further down it tells you the exact gauges Kenny Wayne Shepherd plays. Somebody who actually knows strings wrote that page.
Three fixes
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the hero is six pages fighting
The top of the page is a six-slide carousel. Meet The New Classics, String Theory with Petey USA, the Source Audio acquisition, a John Petrucci FretWrap, Big Sound with Dinosaur Jr., Jacquard Straps. Three different asks across them: Buy Now, Watch Now, Learn More.
There is also no H1 anywhere on the page. The largest type a visitor sees is a slide heading that rotates away before they finish reading it.
Pick one slide. Let the other five be rows underneath it.
a first visit gets one thing to do, and the top of the page finally holds still long enough to be read.
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the story is filed under Support
Top nav reads Strings, Accessories, Merch, Artists, CULTURE, Support. About sits inside the Support dropdown, between Forums and FAQ.
That About page is the strongest page on the site. 1962. Sterling Ball running a cash register at nine years old. Headquarters to San Luis Obispo. String and strap manufacturing to the Coachella Valley. Music Man bought in 1984 to build guitars and basses in California.
All of it is currently a help-desk link, one slot below a nav item called CULTURE that holds two interview series.
Move About to the top level.
the one thing on this site nobody can copy stops being customer service.
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the answers exist and nothing can quote them
View source on the homepage and on /faq. Neither page carries a single ld+json block, so there is no Organization markup and no FAQPage markup on thousands of words of answers a real person wrote. Neither ernieball.com nor music-man.com serves an llms.txt.
Music Man's only appearance on this homepage is a logo in the top strip. The words sit in an alt attribute on the link; the image itself carries none.
FAQPage on /faq, Organization on the homepage naming the family of brands, llms.txt on both domains. That's template work, not a rebuild.
when a player asks an assistant what gauge Kenny Wayne Shepherd runs, the answer Ernie Ball already wrote is the one it repeats.
What I'd make instead
CULTURE holds String Theory and Big Sound. Both are conversations with other people about their music. Nothing on the site is about the buildings.
The About page says strings and straps are made in the Coachella Valley, and that Music Man was bought to build guitars and basses in California. Those are two floors with people standing on them, and a visitor never sees either one.
One week, both floors, shot as work rather than as a brand story. Winding, sanding, the hands. No voiceover saying it's made here. You'd be looking at it.
If one of the three is worth the time, I'll send the rest of the read. If not, no reply needed.
Jason Portillo
Boring Stories · boringstories.io