Archive for the ‘Websites’ category

AOL to buy Bebo for $850 million

March 13th 2008 by Andrew Banks in General, WebsitesNo Comments »

Various websites are reporting that AOL has come through as the buyer of Bebo for the small sum of $850 million.

The BBC is reporting “Rumours that the social network Bebo would be swallowed up by someone have been swirling around for at least a year. Google, Yahoo, MySpace and Viacom have all been names as potential suitors. Now the truth is out – and it’s AOL which has picked up the prize for $850m”

Time Warner have now confirmed this with a statement on their website and have also confirmed that this is a purely cash deal.

“AOL announced today that it has entered into an agreement to acquire Bebo (http://www.bebo.com),a leading global social media network. Together with its AIM and ICQ personal communications network, the acquisition will give AOL a premier position in the fast growing world of social media with a network of approximately 80 million unique users.”

I strongly suspect that the ongoing saga with Microsoft trying to by Yahoo is going to force a period of consolidation between the larger players in social marketing and search as they try to strengthen their position in the market place. It’s started with Bebo and I predict we will see a lot more of this in the coming months as organisation try to strengthen their position and protect themselves from being bought out.
So who do you expect to be next and are we seeing another major dot com boom era? Should we expect the same as last time and prepare for the bust to follow?

Dear BBC - I am not blind

February 27th 2008 by Andrew Banks in Websites4 Comments »

Well it’s a sad day for the BBC Website in my opinion.

They’ve finally gone live with the new BBC homepage and I really don’t see why it needed to change. As I’ve blogged about previously, the BBC have often lead the way with their homepage but this time I think they’ve hit rock bottom.

Some excellent features have made there way into the new homepage but overall I’m just not convinced.

What I like:

• The ability to specify my own content
• Allowing me to re-organise the homepage based on how I like the page to be laid out
• Strangely, the clock. But only from a geeky technical perspective
• The fact it works just as well (or at least degrades gracefully) without JavaScript - well done to the technical team responsible for this

What I dislike:

• That 25% of my screen is dominated by the main image
• That the whole colour scheme changes dependant on which main image/feature I view - very off putting
• The size! Man, the BBC must have some research that shows the majority of their website audience are visually impaired because the sheer scale of every screen element is huge. I myself, like the majority of web user, have good vision so please don’t give me a website that is so large by default
• Web 2.0 overkill - the whole page just looks like the design team looked for every Web 2.0 cliché and put it into one page

Hopefully this will develop like all previous BBC home pages and some of these niggles I have will be removed over time.

Allow the customer to find the product - GameStation.co.uk

January 24th 2008 by Andrew Banks in E-Commerce, Websites1 Comment »

Surely one of the most fundamental tasks a customer undertakes when trying to purchase, be it online or offline, is finding the product in the first place. In an online purchasing experience this boils down to one of two things - simple navigation, or more often than not, the search box.

Whilst looking online for a new XBOX game today I landed upon GameStation where I conducted a quick search for Assasin’s Creed (one of the best selling XBOX 360 games at the moment). Suprisingly, GameStation didn’t even sell the game (or so the search results told me). Having been into one of there many retail outlets I know they stock the game - so why wasn’t it on the website?

The problem is with GameStation’s broken search feature not accepting the ‘ character. I’m guessing for security reasons (SQL Injection) they’re stripping certain characters before sending the search into the database. There’s much better ways of protecting from SQL Injection that don’t impact on a customer purchasing experience as much as this approach does, if at all. To see this for yourself simply go to www.gamestation.co.uk and search for “assassin’s creed”. You’ll notice that no search results are returned and your search phrase has been cut down to “assassin” in the search box.

Regardless of the cause of this, the crux is that this will have lost GameStation a certain number of sale, especially over the Christmas period. The search works on Play, Amazon and Game - three of GameStation’s biggest competitors.

I’d be interested to know if the guys at GameStation actually know about this. My suspicion  is that they don’t, but they will be wondering why Amazon, Play and Game outsold them at Christmas.

BBC Homepage Beta – Jumping on the Web 2.0 band wagon

January 22nd 2008 by Andrew Banks in Websites1 Comment »

The new BBC home page is undergoing some changes and the BBC is after your feedback.

Previously the BBC has launched some excellent versions of their website and BBC.co.uk has been one of the most innovative websites in recent years.

For example, the Glasswall version was outstanding.

However, this time around I think they’ve got a long way to go before this Beta version should be released into live.

So what are the issues?

Ultimately I believe this beta version is suffering from “Web 2.0 Syndrome”, with web 2.0 design being an obvious inspiration for the graphical treatment of the homepage. There is also an abundance of Web2.0 features and technology in use on the site – such as AJAX and user generated/specified content.

A lot of the new features will be really useful and are in tune with the BBC’s ways of innovating on BBC.co.uk - such as specifying your own homepage content, mini widgets for TV and weather panels. These are great ways of using Web 2.0 functionality to allow large amounts of content to be displayed in small screen areas and the way the BBC has implemented them means that the whole page appears to be very responsive and tactile – a great positive for the customer experience.

On the flip side of this the graphical treatment of the page makes it feel like a “BBC for Dummies” website. Al the buttons and panels look like they belong on a touch screen interface as they are big enough for even the fattest of fingers to hit.

From a usability stance I don’t agree with the way colour coding has been used. Typical websites may use colour coding to define sections of a website, for example sport may have a blue nav bar and entertainment may have a red nav bar. What the BBC have done on their site is to provide coloured tabs under the main header image to flip in and out of various features. If these coloured tabs were representative of the section they took you too I would be happy, but what the BBC implemented is a full colour change of the whole page dependent on which main feature you view. It feels almost like a developer said “Hey, look what I can do, and doesn’t it look cool….” and that usability was completely discarded.

My final rant for the day is this…

Why the hell do we need a clock sitting in the top right of the BBC home page? It reminds me of 1999 when websites had JavaScript clocks that followed your mouse around the page. It’s not big ad it’s not clever.