From what I’ve read lately, I expected itv.com’s online video service to be a bit rubbish. I wasn’t prepared for it to be spectacularly bad.
I’ve been trying to keep abreast of the Tour de France since it started on July 5th. Considering it’s the world’s biggest (and best - bike bias acknowledged) annual sporting event, TV coverage is woeful: a 1-hour slot on ITV 4 every evening. But - wait a second - how convenient! You can catch up online on itv.com!
Here are a couple of screen grabs that sum up my experience of watching the Tour on itv.com:
Great!
Just great.
Over the past week of viewing on a Mac (which is supported) in 2 different locations (thus ruling out bandwidth or bad internet connection as possible faults) I’ve encountered a grim catalogue of errors:
- player hangs or freezes during playback
- selected video doesn’t play on request (this is not about buffering, I know what buffering is)
- videos are ‘not available’ for some unexplained reason
- the selection of Tour videos goes from e.g. 7 (we’re currently on Stage 9) to 2, and now at time of writing, 3 - again with no explanation
Not to mention incomprehensible error messages, bad player controls and navigation, and having to watch the same advertisement up to 8 times in an hour of playback. And what’s with Silverlight by the way? Having to download and install it before viewing is like some nightmare flashback to Real Player days.
The Tour de France videos must be among the most popular programmes on ITV Catch Up at present. If it was any good, this would be an effective way to promote this service to viewers who perhaps wouldn’t normally use it (from the looks of it most visitors are catching up on Corrie). But it isn’t any good, it’s awful.
Hey ITV! Spend some money and sort it out!
For anyone hunting for a decent way to watch Le Tour online, try www.letour.fr. Here’s a decent video service with daily short clips summarising the day’s action, albeit without Phil Liggett. This content is re-purposed by a number of other news sites (like this one, which plays back using Jeroen Wijering’s very excellent and now ubiquitous FLV Player).
By now you ought to know that I love cycling and bikes. I’m also pretty keen on web design. So when a bike manufacturer I really like gets a new website, I’m excited.
Condor Cycles, the iconic London bike builder, race team and brand name, had a ‘coming soon’ holding page on its site for most of 2007 - for so long, in fact, that I almost got in touch to offer my services. But I just checked back, and they’ve relaunched!
Here are some of the things wrong with the site:
- Sloppy code: the visual elements of the site rely on Flash, and there’s no text content, or keyword or description metadata, so it’s no surprise the site doesn’t show up on the first page of Google for a search for ‘london bike shop’.
- Dodgy user interface: I know what they were trying to do with the ‘virtual catalogue’, but the Flash page turner tool is fiddly to use and doesn’t encourage browsing, even if there are additional buttons for ‘next page’ and ‘previous page’ on certain screens. What happens if I want to download an image of one of the bikes or email to a friend? I can’t.
- The ’store opening hours’ page opens in a new window. A minor point, arguably, but the issue that prompted this post. Here’s why you shouldn’t do this on a single domain - or indeed ever.
So why use Flash, really? Can it be easy for Condor staff to update details in their catalogue? No - there’s no product database feeding into the site. In 2009 when their new bikes are launched, they’ll have to start over.
What Condor needs, to do justice to their excellent store, solid reputation and superb bikes, is:
- A clear, accessible site designed in standards-compliant HTML and CSS, to boost its search engine rankings and improve navigability.
- A better catalogue system that displays pages to the browser transparently, with unique URLs per product, and which the store staff can update easily.
Next time I’m in to pick up new inner tubes, it may be time for a quiet word with the manager…
Following on from my post on Flat-hunting with Flash, I’ve just noticed another odd usage of Flash on the Curzon Cinemas website. In this case it isn’t so much about Flash not being the right tool for the job; it merely highlights an unnecessary cosmetic application of Flash on a site that really doesn’t need it.
On the site, try switching to the non-Flash version via the link in the bottom right-hand corner. The non-Flash home page looks pretty similar to the Flash version, except:
- the content is constrained to the viewport and the four columns of info become scrollable
- the image blocks at the bottom of the page are thus kept in view
- there’s a cascade effect as the page loads and the text drops into view
My angle on this is:
- if the main reason for wanting to constrain the content to the viewport is keeping the image blocks in view - why not bring them further up the page?
Curzon has a perfectly functional HTML website with a nice URL structure that helps its performance on Google. Each HTML page can be viewed in Flash or non-Flash - but if you’re in Flash mode and you navigate away from the original page, the URL doesn’t change, which is potentially confusing for the unsavvy.
The point is that Curzon didn’t need to deploy Flash. Improvements in the home page structure would remove the need for keeping all content in view at once, by prioritising more popular content (i.e. what’s on now - not what’s on in a fortnight). The cascade effects are initially cute but actually become tedious when you’re really looking for information. There’s no value added by what would have taken extra time and expense in development.
The very presence of a non-Flash option implies an awareness that some visitors might find it annoying, or inconvenient, and would prefer to view the site normally - which is not great web strategy.
For a good example of a beneficial implementation of Flash, check the superb Barbican home page.
A favourite of mine, this page displays ever-changing content inside a set of 6 vibrantly colour-coded windows. In this case, Flash is used to add visual dynamism to a rigid HTML table grid; it’s effective and attractive, but it’s used sparingly.