It wouldn’t take too many sales of a $1495 handbag to pay a top end designer to design your web site. Apparently, some prestigious companies must feel the investment is not worth it. Let’s take a look at names you may be familiar with.
Clothing
Gucci – The overall feel of this website is fairly poor. While browsing products is intuitive enough, adding items to your shopping cart becomes mangled by pop up windows, flash menus, and excessive text.
Dolce & Gabbana – It seems that a black and white site made in flash equates to an exclusive web site. I understand their target audience wants a unique feel, but this has got to be pushing it.
Prada - I’m not sure if this is their official site, but the fact that I can’t easily Google it becomes a problem in itself.
Fendi - Only works in IE, and you can tell they won’t be shy with the Flash.
Cars
Lamborghini - Nooooo! And I love their cars so much. Beware of the pop up survey and the obtrusive Flash.
Ferrari - Good compared to the rest, but it still confuses me. Why are 5 red and yellow animations blinking at me? Am I supposed to know what a blinking circle that says “Start” means?
Porsche - Finally, a good site. Let’s give them some credit.
Bentley Motors - Choose your language and launch their site. I choose English, and it was a painful experience.
You see though, there are lots of people that like designs like that (myself not included). I took a business writing class this past semester and one of our assignments was to go out and find websites that we thought were well designed and eye catching. Almost the whole class picked websites out like Gucci or Lamborghini. I was confused why they liked websites with blinking graphics everywhere and sound for no reason, but apperently there is an audience for that sorta stuff.
Porsche = Goodness! Very intuitive, great design, i was very impressed!
WTF is up with prada???
I’m not quite sure why some people like sites like that. It is tempting to do a study on it. My first guess is that they don’t know any better. I have no problem with people liking Flash sites like 2advanced - I used to fall into that category.
What I don’t understand is why these big companies choose not to hire the top flash developers and designers. If your gonna make your site try to appeal to an audience that likes animated stuff, why not go out and hire the best?
And I’m not saying the teams that developed these sites suck - just that whoever had decision making power made some poor decisions. Surely a pop up shopping cart with text that scrolls forever can’t be appealing to too many people.
The Gucci site resized my browser and moved it and stuff. That really irritates me, especially because I am on a dual-monitor workstation. So, the window was half on one monitor and half on the other. Grrr.
So send them an email (especially the browser-resizing issue). Let them know that tricks like that won’t cut it anymore. How are they ever going to know they screwed up bigtime unless someone says something?
BTW, the comment entry system on this site is a bit annoying. When the comments force a newline, it pushes the comment box further down the screen, thus breaking the eye line.
These sites were obviously designed with little thought to the end user experience.
The client probably had very clear ideas about how they wanted their sites to look and I would imagine that the developers had to run with that.
I agree that criticism is useless unless you can be constructive about it (ie: email them), but at the same time their sites could be very productive for them, which makes my speculation worth nothing. In fact, for 7 major companies to have sites like that must mean that they work somehow, but I just don’t understand it.
Thanks for pointing the comment system flaw out. We’ve been unhappy with our comments for awhile now, and will throw some changes out soon.
It is not said, that these sites are successful or how successful they are. My bet is, that they do not do any controlling on how they perform and have no idea how much better they could do.
And clearly, they do not care much about their online shop. You buy exclusive items at a physical store, not online. They have a online shop, because everyone has one.
I have to agree with you on the Porsche site. For years their site was a mess of pages with no obvious navigation or hierarchy. Up until recently, I was not a fan.
But the current site is quite nice compared to most car manufacturers’ sites, which is just sad if you consider how much money these companies are making.
Perhaps these “high end” companies will come to their senses soon.