Scroll-stop teardown
RIEDEL CommunicationsThe homepage
What it's trying to do
The homepage sells infrastructure nobody buys alone. An engineer specs it, a producer approves it, and it gets paid for by someone who will never touch a panel. The page has to hold all three readers at once, which is the hardest job a B2B homepage gets handed.
I write audits of companies that never asked. 712 so far, twelve of them public. This is one.
I read it twice. Once the way a person does: first sentence, buttons, who it's for. Once the way a machine does, because the assistant answering "who makes intercom for live broadcast" reads the code, not the design.
What works
The news rail is the strongest thing on the site. It rotates, so here is August 31: Scottish Rugby expanding a managed coach-communications partnership. Transformation Church running Artist and Bolero. Edith Cowan University in Perth putting live production into its classrooms. Named places, named gear, no adjectives doing the work of a fact. Rare on a B2B homepage, and checkable in a minute.
Three fixes
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the page has no headline
There is no H1 on riedel.net. Twenty-seven H2s, and three of those are "Search", "Social Media Footer", and "Search content:". Nothing on the page is marked as the sentence the page is about.
A person feels this before a crawler does. The top of the page is a rotating slider: "hi there!", "Bolero Mini", "I'm an ARTIST", "REPLAY FOR EVERYBODY", "Reach the HorizoN". Every one assumes you know the catalog. Someone sent by a producer reads five riddles before reading a noun.
The sentence is already written, low on the page in the "We are Riedel" block: "We live for media production and global events, providing intercom systems and fiber-based networks for the distribution of video, audio, and data signals."
Move it up. Make it the H1.
the first thing on the page says what the company does, and the page gets one subject instead of twenty-seven.
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every exit says the same non-word
Count the calls to action. On August 31 there were twenty-one, in six spellings: "Learn more." "Learn More." "LEARN MORE." "More." "more." "read more." Six ways to spell a word that commits to nothing.
The Scottish Rugby card and the Transformation Church card are the two best things on the page, and both hand you the same instruction as the brochure download. The cards do the selling and the buttons flatten them back to equal.
Name the destination on the button. Read the Scottish Rugby build. See the Transformation Church install. Same links, same page, one casing.
the proof keeps its weight through the click, instead of teaching people that every button on the page goes to the same nowhere.
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the crawler is reading a different site
riedel.net has no sitemap. /sitemap.xml is a 404, so are sitemap_index.xml and the language-scoped version, and robots.txt names none. It does carry eight Disallow lines written without a leading slash, which no crawler will honor.
No structured data on the homepage. Zero ld+json blocks. No Organization markup, no logo, no products.
Thirty of the thirty-one images carry an empty alt attribute.
The browser tab reads "RIEDEL » Home", so the one field every search result shows spends half of it on the word Home.
the machines now answering "who makes intercom for live broadcast" get told the answer instead of inferring it.
What I'd make instead
The site never shows the part only Riedel has.
Every named show on that news rail had a rack, a bench, and somebody who fixed a thing at three in the afternoon with doors at seven. The homepage shows product renders. The archive has trucks.
One show. One engineer. The bench at the compound, not the factory floor. Shot the day it happens, cut to the length of a scroll.
A stagehand who has never worked that show should come away understanding why the name is still on the panel.
If one of the three is worth acting on, I'll send the rest of the read. If not, that's a fine answer.
Want yours? Tell me what you're making.
Jason Portillo
Boring Stories · boringstories.io