Cigar Website Review: CAO Cigars

Several months ago I saw a cigar-oriented blog do some reviews of cigar websites and thought it was an interesting idea. Then I started doing more consistent and thorough cigar reviews for the Tiki Bar and I started seeing how vastly different cigar company websites are. They can be high-tech or low-tech (Flash vs. HTML), but the bottom line with a website is simply this: usability. Does the website give you information in a clear and concise manner and remain simply to use, making you want to return in the future and tell other people about it. There are some heavy-hitters in the cigar industry that could do much better than they currently are in this area; thankfully, today I get to start by reviewing a company that is doing it right.

CAOCigars.com
And I've picked an appropriate time to review this website since it is still "CAO Month" on the Tiki Bar Online blog. I will start right from the beginning and say that since I have moved to a rural area where "broadband" is a relative term, I uniformly hate Flash-based websites. They take too long to load, they are gimmicky, and they are difficult to navigate and have severe limits to usability. Well, I do not uniformly hate them anymore--CAO's website is a glowing example of how a Flash-based site can actually be a joy and not the world wide web's version of waterboarding.

To start off, even with my DSL-based connection, the CAO home page takes only 8 seconds to load. You are greeted by some familiar and friendly cigar bands, which take you to the page for those cigars if you click on them. There is a circle in the bottom right corner that rotates the view of cigar bands so you can view all their lines; you can also rotate through them using the right and left arrows below the largest band.

To the left is a hierarchical menu that hides until you roll your mouse over it. It can take you to the individual cigar lines as well as to other parts of the site that include Tim Ozgener's blog, an event calendar, and a swag shop. The cigar pages are where I have spent the majority of my time and that's where this review focuses.

Each cigar is introduced with an interesting little story that reveals the inspiration behind the cigars. You can then navigate to the "Anatomy" page to find out where each element (filler, binder, wrapper) originates from (general countries only, though, no specific areas of those countries), the "Packaging" page to see how the cigars are presented in the store, or the "Sizes" page to view all the different vitolas for that particular line--and there is a picture of each one along with the officially-rated sizes. This is a joy to find when trying to accurately describe the contents, size, and inspiration behind some of the best cigars on the market. The fact that each click is followed by just a second or two of delay is very nice as well; despite the fact that this is Flash-based and full of eye-candy, the individual pages end up loading as fast or faster than many HTML pages. Either the sizes are very well-managed or they are using some sort of pre-loading scheme; I don't care, though, all I know is that it works!

So what do I not like about CAO's website? The only thing that bugs me is that they rely on pop-up windows for Events, Ozblog, Newsletter, and other options. I really don't like it when a site insists on opening a new window to give me more information and I would prefer if they could just integrate these elements into the same fantastic design that they use for the cigar pages.

Website Grade: A-