Recreational Warehouse: A 44 URL Outdoor Living Catalog
One North Tonawanda store sells above ground pools, hot tubs, patio furniture, grills, game tables and saunas. The website has to carry all of it without turning into a maze. Here is how it is built, and what is still on our list to fix.
What Recreational Warehouse Sells
Recreational Warehouse is an outdoor living retailer serving Buffalo and Western New York from North Tonawanda. Its own meta description names the range: "Above Ground Swimming Pools, Spas, Hot Tubs, Patio Furniture, Gas Grills, Gas Logs, Ventless Logs, Ventless Fireplaces in Buffalo, NY."
The page list shows the design problem. There are pages for inground pool liners, safety covers and safety fences. For Weber Spirit, Genesis, Summit and Kettle grills, and for the Big Green Egg. For fire pits, pool tables, arcade games, SunSetter awnings and saunas. Those product lines and brand relationships are the store's, not ours.
A retailer with that much catalog can either bury it behind one thin products page or give every line its own address. We gave every line its own address.
What We Built
One page for each thing somebody searches for
The sitemap lists 44 URLs. Almost all are product pages, and almost all name the product and the market in the slug: /above-ground-swimming-pools-buffalo, /spas-hot-tubs-buffalo, /weber-genesis-series-gas-grills-buffalo, /saunas-buffalo.
Nobody in Western New York searches for "outdoor living products." They search for an above ground pool, a Big Green Egg or a sauna, and a page per line gives each of those searches its own title and its own copy. Structure first is how we approach search engine optimization, and how we lay out any small business website with a real catalog behind it.
The list is not perfectly consistent. The FAQ sits at /frequently_asked_questions while every other URL uses hyphens, and 22 of the 44 sitemap entries wrap the address in stray whitespace. Both are worth standardizing.
Structured data the store can keep true
The site carries a JSON-LD LocalBusiness block with the store name, telephone, email, postal address and an openingHoursSpecification covering weekdays and Saturday. There is no rating markup in it, because we do not mark up review scores for anyone.
Hours matter more than usual for a seasonal retailer. The header currently reads "Sunday: Closed (until Spring)," so that block sits in a client-editable region and staff change it when the season turns. The contact form is at /contact rather than on the home page, and it asks for an order number, which is the giveaway that this is a retailer with product installed in the field.
The accessibility widget, and what it does not mean
The site loads the Sienna accessibility widget, which hands a visitor display controls such as contrast and text size. It is not a compliance certificate, and we will not describe this or any other site as ADA compliant, which is the first thing we say in any accessibility conversation.
All 19 images on the home page carry an alt attribute. Six of them still read "Image Slider" or "Banner Image," the theme's placeholders. Writing six real descriptions is a small job, still on the list.
What the Site Loads, and the Fault in It
The home page pulls in 11 stylesheets and 7 scripts. Bootstrap 5.0.2 and animate.css load from public CDNs. Five of the eleven stylesheets are icon fonts: Font Awesome, IcoMoon, Elegant Icons, Feather and the theme's own. The scripts are the Bootstrap bundle, the Slick carousel, Google Analytics, the accessibility widget, the site's own app.js, and two jQuery plugins.
That last item is the real fault, and it sits on a site we build and maintain. jQuery, Popper and a second copy of Bootstrap were commented out of the markup, so they do not load at all. But jquery.countdown and jquery.mmenu were left in. They are jQuery plugins. They download on every page view and cannot run, because the library they extend is not on the page.
None of that is being defended here. The fix is to confirm what still calls those two files, then remove the tags or restore the dependency. No speed claim appears on this page either, because we did not measure the site before and after anything. Fewer files is a maintenance argument, and that is all we claim from it.
See It Live
The site is at Recreational Warehouse. Its footer credits AldoMedia and links back to our web design, 360 virtual tour and Buffalo SEO pages, and the store appears in our portfolio.
More Catalog Than Website?
If your store carries dozens of product lines and the site hides them behind one page, we will map what you sell against what you have a page for, and tell you what closing the gap involves.
Frequently Asked Questions
What does the Recreational Warehouse home page actually load?
Eleven stylesheets and seven scripts. Bootstrap 5.0.2 and animate.css come from public CDNs, five of the eleven stylesheets are icon fonts, and the scripts include the Slick carousel, Google Analytics, an accessibility widget and two jQuery plugins. That is a description of the asset stack, not a speed claim.
Why do jQuery plugins load on a page that has no jQuery?
Because jQuery, Popper and a second copy of Bootstrap were commented out of the markup and two plugins that depend on jQuery were left in. jquery.countdown and jquery.mmenu still download on every page view and cannot run without the library they extend. It is a real fault on a site we maintain, and the fix is to remove the tags or restore the dependency.
Does AldoMedia claim the store, the brands or the product lines on this site?
No. The North Tonawanda store, the pools, spas, patio furniture, grills and game tables, and every brand named on the site belong to Recreational Warehouse. AldoMedia built the website that presents them.
Is the Recreational Warehouse site ADA compliant?
We do not use that phrase about any website. The site loads the Sienna accessibility widget, which gives a visitor display controls such as contrast and text size. A widget is an assist, not a conformance determination, and six images on the home page still carry placeholder alt text from the theme.