Mikhail's Soft Blog

How not to/How to... Albefurs

Sometimes it's fun to bash bad websites, but often it isn't. A fresh example of the latter case is www.albefurs.com, a link brought to us by SSFF regular Hack__Jack.
Why wouldn't it feel quite the same to unleash our best irony - if not sarcasm - on this effort? Most of all - these people have been trying very hard. They've forked out for a designer who knows his Flash (wow!), there was a really amazing photographer at work and the products look promising too, in spite of the website.
Hold on, in spite of?
Yes. First of all, people don't come to this website to watch a Flash animation, they're looking for furs. There's a 'Skip' button, but it takes dangerously long to show up, even on my 3,2 GHz machine and broadband connection. If internetsurfers have a patience span of 20 seconds, Albefurs.com is one foot over the edge.
Secondly, there's the music. If talked about music on websites before, and to sum it up, it's almost always an annoyance, be it Beethoven or The Ramones. Sadly, Albefurs' music isn't Beethoven at all. Even if you have no other music running yourself or if you are in a noise-friendly environment, this is the kind of 'music' that makes you really, really want to go away after a minute or so. It gets to your nerves and it makes you want to smash things if you do hang around for longer.
Thirdly, there's the pictures. I love photography, I love fashion and I can tell you, these are wonderful pictures, which is exactly why it's a waste and a shame that they're so small, even looking at it from the shop's point of view. There used to be time when there were reasons to use small pictures on websites, but since then, let's say five years ago, things have moved on. No one's using a 640 x 480 screen resolution anymore and if there's anyone still using a 56K dial-in modem, he or she's probably living somewhere in the Third World - not a likely Albefurs customer. On the other hand, go to a serious photo gallery and you'll see that most if not all pictures are displayed at very large sizes. There's reason for that: 'Less if more' doesn't work for the size of good pictures. Photos have larger impact on a larger size. Add to that for furs: you'll get a much better 'feel' for the fur's texture if the picture has a decent size, and the fur's softness is obviously a major drool-factor when it comes to selling them.
The only reason I can think of making the pictures so small: it might disturb the page design. Now, the page design would be much more important than selling furs, wouldn't it? Whose priorities are we talking about here?

Excuse me for getting ironic after all. Some positive suggestions:
1. Add plain HTML next to the Flash, if you want to stick to Flash at all. Visually challenged surfers will love it too. Just because people are blind or have eye-problems, it doesn't mean they can't afford or enjoy a fur coat.
2. Ditch the music. Delete it. Burn it. Nuke it. Shoot the composer. Strangle the guy who told you it would be a good idea to put it on the site, and do it real slow. You don't want music if you want a people-friendly website.
3. Larger pictures. Are you proud of your product? Show it. Even better: put your logo on them and make them downloadable. For the foreseeable future they're going to do the rounds among online fur lovers, saying 'Albefurs-Albefurs-Albefurs'. They're that good, and who wouldn't want that?

Labels: fur fashion marketing webdesign

posted by Eric ForFriends @ 2:12 AM