Nestea
While developing my final web project for the collect-a-cap, I was directed toward the Nestea website for inspiration on how the design of a site could be used to dramatically enhance and promote a product. The home page has two navigation systems, a primary that is designated by being on top and a secondary below it. The groups for the primary navigation make sense home, products, downloads, recipes, tell friends, and refresh in the U.S. The last one, refresh in U.S. might not seem to clear what it leads to but I will talk more about that later. The secondary navigation is three groups bottle/can, refrigerated, and instant tea mix. The secondary navigation is actually just the second nav for the products primary nav link but both nav systems remain on every page of the site except one, the “bottle/can” link; they both disappear when you enter that page.

home page

The secondary nav could just show up when you click on the products link instead of being on every page, which seems to make more sense, but since it is a product geared website, the designers probably wanted the product options to always be accessible directly throughout the site. Why both nav systems disappear once you click on the bottle/can link and not any others is kind of unclear. It takes you to a page that looks different than the entire site but carries the same theme. This could be because the bottle/can is their most popular and important product and therefore deserves a more unique and dedicated appearance.

bottle/can page

The primary and secondary navs don’t have rollover or selected states so it can become pretty confusing where you are in the site. The pages do have headings, but without selected states in the nav systems you can get lost in all the colorful decorations and designs that each page has. The bottle/can page is really confusing because it has no headings and like I said earlier loses all the navigation so it leaves you somewhat lost. You can always get back to the homepage though since home is one of the primary nav links and there is a “Nestea home” link in the separate bottle/can page.
The site has a moderately deep architecture. There are a lot of pages but the levels do not go very deep. The architecture is not flat, more navigational links show up as you access deeper levels of the site. For example when you click products, the three products show up that are clickable along with other links such as “frequently asked questions” and “serving a crowd? click for multi-pack information.” I don’t think this is a bad thing, because the links that show up are specific to the category that you are in and it is not necessary to be able to access them at any time.

products page

There is not a lot of typography but what is there is very nice in this website. All the fonts are non sans serif and the headings have good spacing making everything very easy on the eyes. The techniques used to separate the headings are different fonts, different sizes, and different colors. I believe the colors are an important typography factor since the site in general is full of bright colors the typography must match its intensity. The labels are mostly clear except for the “refresh in the U.S.” link in the primary nav. It is unclear because the page does not have really anything to do with the Nestea product. It’s a map of the U.S. with each state being clickable and highlighting three interesting places to visit that are associated with land, air, and water. Once you select a place you want to visit, you send an only postcard to a friend through email asking them to join you on an adventure. While I get the purpose of this page, to spread the Nestea brand label and associate taking a plunge/new travel adventures with Nestea, I don’t really think it fulfills its purpose that well. I don’t see people using this feature at all when looking for places to travel and getting friends to come along just because it has nothing to do with a beverage promoting website.

refresh in the U.S. page

The besides the one “bottle/can” page, the grid of the pages stays consistent throughout the website. The primary and secondary nav remain at the top and the background and frame of the site also stay the same. The different colorful decorations and designs within the body of the page do change from page to page just to keep the site lively, and full of color. The focal point of any page is definitely all the colorful designs and decorations on each page of different fruits, flowers, ice, and splashing tea. The bright colors definitely engage the viewer and capture their immediate attention.


The imagery and photos make up the entire design of the site. The bright colors bring so much excitement and joy to simple iced tea. The designers purposely chose this effect to promote the Nestea brand. The site has a perfect about of images and photos. There is an icon on the bottle/can page that I had trouble understanding at first. The page has a secondary navigation of home, iced tea, and green tea. The selected state for this secondary navigation is a different color and a checked box next to it. However, since the other navs didn’t have a selected state, the use of the checked box icon was a bit confusing. I tried to click on the icon to uncheck it but that didn’t do anything. It was after clicking on the other nav links and seeing the check box move from home onto them that I understood that it was just a selected state icon.

bottle/can page

As I said before there are a bunch of colors on any given page. The pages need lots of bright tropical colors to create that refreshing effect. However the bright colors don’t do a good job separating content because most of the content is bright colorful images of the products also. Therefore the content sometimes blends in with the back ground design and decoration in one big colorful collage.
The objective of this site is to rejuvenate the Nestea brand with bright colorful designs that are energizing and refreshing. It’s a product promoting site and I believe they did a great job bringing life to Beverage Company. There is no search feature on the site, but it’s a limited site without a big database of information so I believe a search feature is unnecessary. My favorite feature is the recipes link in the primary navigation. I think it’s a great idea to make more uses of iced tea and promote the product.

recipes page

Like I mentioned before I did find navigating through the site a bit confusing. I would add selected states to the primary and secondary navs. I would also maybe eliminate the second nav all together and just access it through the products link in the primary nav, it’s kind of redundant and confusing whether the links are different than the products’ links. Also I would not make the bottle/cans link so completely different than the rest of the site and add the navigation back onto it just to keep the site consistent and not so random. But overall I think this site does a wonderful job accomplishing its mission to rejuvenate the Nestea brand and invigorate peoples’ thirst.