Bi-Rite Market on the Web

The New York Times Small Business Section ran a story recently on Bi-Rite Market and the redesign of their Web Site. Bi-Rite Market is something of an institution here in San Francisco. A grocery store with a huge and faithful following, it doesn’t see itself as just a grocery store. People actually line up on the street to get inside. The reviews for the store on Yelp are overwhelmingly positive. The homepage on the store’s Web site proclaims, “Bi-Rite is a neighborhood market, feeding our community with love, passion & integrity.”

Sam Mogannam, who owns both the market and a nearby creamery, wanted his Web sites to capture the spirit of his stores. “We wanted the experience of logging on to biritemarket.com and biritecreamery.com to be as similar to the experience of walking through the door of our market and creamery as we could,” Mr. Mogannam said.

Although the market has been around since the 1940s, its first Web site wasn’t introduced until 2003. Last year, Mr. Mogannam invested $18,000 in a redesign, hoping to solve problems with both the site’s design and its back-end administration. “We’d had a site for several years but it was static and difficult to update,” he said. “Making our site more dynamic was the No. 1 priority in creating a new biritemarket.com.”

The NYTimes asked readers to take a look at the site and at Bi-Rite’s social media efforts. Here’s what you had to say, along with my take and Mr. Mogannam’s response. http://boss.blogs.nytimes.com/category/site-analysis/