Vector Air Website Update: A Better Way to Find Your Way Around
- Vector Air
- 13 hours ago
- 5 min read
We’ve been doing a bit of rebuilding behind the scenes.
Luke has been working through a fairly substantial redesign of the Vector Air website, with the main aim being simple: make it easier to actually find what you’re looking for. Revolutionary concept for a website, apparently.
This isn't just a visual refresh. We've been restructuring how products are categorised, how customers can filter them and how we can direct people towards the right products when we're answering questions over email.
There are also a few new bits appearing along the way, including a completely new Knives & Tools section.
A New Way of Looking at the Catalogue
As Vector Air has grown, the old approach of effectively dividing everything into "airgun" and "airsoft" has started to become a bit restrictive.
We're now importing and distributing a much wider range of products, and we're seeing more customers from outside the traditional airgun market shopping with us for optics, mounts, bags, bipods, tripods, tools and other equipment.
That means it doesn't always make sense for a product to be buried inside a category because of the platform it happens to be mounted to.
We've therefore started reorganising the main menu around industry and product type, with airguns and optics having their own areas while tools, carrying equipment, and shooting accessories are increasingly being given their own dedicated sections.
The idea is that if you're looking for an optic, you shouldn't necessarily have to know whether we think it's primarily an "airgun optic" or an "airsoft optic". You should just be able to find the bloody thing. Or if you don't know what you are looking for, have a list of items that may suit your need. That brings us to the next step of this design...
We've Added Discipline & Use Filters
One of the bigger changes is the introduction of Use / Discipline filters across relevant categories.
This is designed around how people actually shop rather than simply what the manufacturer happens to call something.
For example, if you're looking for an air rifle for a bit of garden fun, you can now filter for products we've categorised around that intended use. Equally, if you're looking for something specifically suited to target shooting, pest control, hunting or a more hybrid application, you can narrow the catalogue accordingly.
We've been doing this because we regularly get questions along the lines of:
"Which pistols can I use for pest control?"
Well, now there's a filter for that. - Air Pistols for Pest Control
It's not intended to tell you what you should buy, but it should make it considerably easier to narrow down the options based on what you're actually trying to achieve.
Left-Handed? We've Thought About You Too
We've also introduced handedness as a catalogue filter.
This is particularly useful for left-handed shooters, where finding out whether a particular rifle is genuinely suitable can otherwise involve trawling through photographs, specifications and sometimes trying to interpret manufacturers' descriptions that appear to have been written by someone who has never met a southpaw.
You can now browse specifically for left-hand usable rifles: Left-Handed Air Rifles
And pistols: Left-Handed Air Pistols
You can even combine filter categories to find something like Regulated PCP Pest Control Guns for Left Handed Shooters
As with the discipline filters, this is something we'll continue improving as we work through the catalogue.
Why Are We Doing All This?
The slightly boring answer is that we've got too big for the old system.
The more interesting answer is that Vector Air is no longer simply a shop selling airguns.
We're an importer and distributor; we work with manufacturers and trade customers, and our product range increasingly overlaps with the wider shooting, optics, outdoor and equipment markets.
We've also noticed that customers who wouldn't necessarily describe themselves as airgun shooters are increasingly buying from us because they want a particular optic, mounting system, bag, bipod or piece of equipment.
The website needs to reflect that.
The new structure should also make it easier for our staff to help you. If you email us asking for a particular type of product, we can now point you towards a filtered selection rather than simply throwing a category page at you and hoping you enjoy scrolling through several hundred products.
We're aiming for less searching, more finding.
It's Still a Work in Progress
A redesign of this size inevitably means something will get missed.
There are a lot of products, categories, filters, links and pages involved, and while we've tried to catch everything before making changes, we're expecting a few things to inevitably fall through the cracks.
You may find a link that goes somewhere strange, a filter that doesn't quite behave as expected or a button that appears to have developed an existential crisis.
There will also be areas where the new structure looks a little sparse initially. That's because we're building additional guides and supporting content around some of these new categories, so not everything will appear fully formed on day one.
If you find something broken, please tell us.
The most useful thing you can send is a screenshot showing the problem, along with a quick explanation of what you were trying to do and where it went wrong. That gives us something considerably more useful than "your website is broken", which, while technically informative, leaves us with rather a lot of possibilities.
More to Come
This is really the beginning of the next version of the Vector Air website rather than the finished product.
The new catalogue structure gives us considerably more flexibility to build buying guides, product comparisons, discipline-specific pages and other useful content around the products themselves.
So if something looks slightly different next time you visit, that's why.
We're trying to make the site work better for everyone, whether you're looking for your next air rifle, trying to find a suitable optic, building a modern shooting setup or simply trying to locate the oddly specific piece of equipment you've spent the last half hour searching for.
And if you do find something that doesn't work...
We'll deal with him accordingly.
---------------------------------------------------
Think we missed something? Let us know in the comments below.
---------------------------------------------------
Image Use for Educational Purposes - This blog post includes images used for educational purposes, not all of which are not owned by the publisher. Efforts have been made to credit image owners/sources appropriately, and any concerns about attribution or copyright should be addressed by contacting us. These images are used solely for educational purposes within fair use guidelines, with no commercial intent. The inclusion of external images does not imply endorsement or sponsorship of our content by image owners/sources. We aim to comply with relevant copyright laws.
Comments