26th
Neither your Genius nor your Cute Pre-loader Keep your All-Flash Site from Sucking
My friend over at the mutual slump posted a tumble about the recent Beck/Danger Mouse collaboration. Clicking his link brought me to the new Beck website but not to the news article about the partnership. At first I was disappointed by the slump’s inability to make a good link. Then I realized the real reason; Beck’s site is 100% Flash.
Flash in and of itself is not a wholly terrible thing. Home Star Runner is a brilliant site that derives much of its cleverness from the animation tools and scripting of Flash (mostly just the animation). But all-Flash sites fail when there is information to be conveyed. A musician’s website has to convey biography, discography, news, and tour dates; all text-based information important to generating revenue for the artist. When this information is hard to access, it potentially reduces revenue streams. Sites built entirely in Flash only allow other sites to link to the main page. Once there it is on the user to navigate the site to try and find what they came for. This situation worsens when the navigational structure is not apparent.
When I went to Beck’s site to find out how Danger Mouse was involved in the new single I was greeted by some cool pre-loaders, some beeps and crackles, and a menu. As the new single began to play, the menu moved off screen and I was watching Beck on stage; no article, no text of any sort. I took the cue given at the time of the page-load and found the menu and clicked on the “News” button. Another animated item dropped down. Here is where things really fell apart. I could not figure out how to scroll the news items. They had just posted the list of tour dates which continued off the small news display area. I finally saw a minuscule sign that says “Drag Me To Scroll.” So I clicked on the little sign and the news slate flew off the page. Turns out I was supposed to grab the item below the sign. It took me three tries to figure this out.
The background of the page, the stage that Beck is playing on, is displaying randomly changing items. The first time I displayed the news slate the background was black. The scroll item is also black. See my problem? When the picture changed to a light color, the item became apparent. This is just plain poor planning and implementation. You do want me to read about you, right? You want me to buy your crap. Make it easy. Don’t challenge me.
Here is the conundrum. You are a great artist and you want to show that in everything you do. Flash is very powerful and can be used to create amazing products. But a musician’s website is not a product. It is a marketing tool to advertise your products. Amazon makes money had over fist by offering up a site that is easily searchable and offers up simple navigation. Sure it is ugly, but it serves its task. I can appreciate that Beck, a retro-soul revivalist, is possibly disinterested in the medium of the web. If so, offer me up some ‘96-era PageMill text and call it a day.
