A newly launched bookshop is made entirely in Flash. And it shows. www.elounge.com is a nightmare – IA-wise, usability-wise and UX-wise it downright sucks.
It performs badly, even on fast machines, and on a Mac your scrollbar simply dissappears if you resize your window.
The good thing is: You probably won’t find the site at all, as it will get really bad page ratings on Google which doesn’t crawl Flash.
Nothing – nothing – on this site couldn’t have been made in dhtml, and that probably faster and less expensive. So why did its agency recommend eLounge to sacrifice the user experience, the SEO, the usability, the legibility to go with a technology that even Gucci won’t use? Or is it that eLounge told the agency to bring out the Flash gimp no matter what? We’ll never know.
Point taken! – and let me enlighten you
A string of mistakes were made along the developing process, but we wanted to get airbourne, so we have done a soft launch. And the solution? well, we have started converting everything into something that everyone can live with. A lesson was learned.
I’m very glad to hear that – and respect to you for making the difficult decision of rewriting the site.
Best regards,
Klaus
Hey
That site sure is a mess, but it is not entirely true that google doesn’t index swf files.
Google has limited crawling capabilities passing the swf, but it acknowledge simple text.
I dont think google is able to pass “loadMovie” og simular actionscript, properly due to potential large file sizes.
http://www.google.dk/search?hl=da&q=site%3Awww.eiler.dk+filetype%3Aswf&meta=
Yes, I see what you mean. But this kind of search result is useless anyway:
[p align="left"][font face="Folio Light" size="16" color="#417280 ...Filtype: Shockwave Flash ...and so on.
BTW: Your site proves another of my points: Do not use back ground music! I was listening to music in my earphones when your site opened with a blast. My ears are hurting like hell now! At least turn down the volume.
I predict that site will fail – why would you even consider using flash for a text based database driven book site? What will that get you but pain and low performance?
Issues:
1) The load time is killing me ? really there is NO WAY I would buy anything.
2) I see no benefit from using the technology that was chosen (Flash)
3) …and if you really wanted to go with smooth layers you should have used Ajax…
4) Why make a book site where I can?t copy-paste the book titles or ISBN in case I want to do an alternative search? Or even worse why can?t I tip a friend with a simple link (every link is: http://www.elounge.com/)
5) I see no business model for the site. What are you providing that I can?t find anywhere else? (Sorry I hear the sound of money being lost).
6) The prises are too high even though they are claimed to be discounted?
7) The site is also ugly this doesn?t add value either.
I could keep on going but I think my post I starting to look mean
Kind regards
Kristian Tørning
On the spot, Kristian. Your post is not mean, it’s just the plain truth.
Hi Klaus
Thank you for your blog. As Henrik wrote we have been working on a new non-flash website since the launch of the other website, partly due to your article.
The new website is now ready, and I hope that you’ll visit us, and if you like come with some feedback on the new site.
Best regards
Michael
CEO
eLounge