Website Reviews 02 Feb

Thanks for checking out another Digital Strategy Website Reviews. Today it's a real mix of sites - from a micro music publisher to a Prime Minister. A couple of holiday companies make up the set. All are interesting but have starkly different digital strategies - one is aimed at sellling on the site, one at communication of a political message, one at providing leads for a travel providers and one of the travel providers, trying to convert leads (browsing visitors) into holiday buyers.

Funky Frog Music
www.funkyfrogmusic.com

Funky Frog Music is the publisher behind Zootopia - a CD of songs for children. This is a great little site that has a simple objective – to let visitors sample the songs and direct them to the shop to purchase. The songs are delightful and each one can be sampled on the site. The samples instantly play – from Midnight Mouse Dancing to The Chickens' Farmyard Hoedown. Each song is themed to a different animal and there are lots of illustrations, all of which are fantastic. As the proud father of young daughters, I can confirm how popular the songs become – firm family favorites. The shop works perfectly and delivery is very quick.

What’s particularly impressive about this site is how a micro-retailer can provide a high specification site with product samples and full ecommerce service. The tools now available for everyone to use means there is little or no barrier to entry in opening an online shop – most of the difficult stuff can be outsourced – the limiting factor is good content. Fortunately, this site works technically and works commercially. Try the songs, buy the CD, feel good about yourself.

Asda Travel
www.asda-travel.co.uk

The travel sector is full of surprising intermediaries, for example, Aldi recently started to offer travel services in UK stores, following the practice in Germany, Aldi’s launch was so successful, they jumped straight into the top 10 travel websites as tracked by Hitwise. Because of their distribution, supermarkets have enormous opportunity to capture non-traditional traffic. Asda has been covering holidays for longer than Aldi and travel site is just a click away from the main site but set on its own domain.

The site focuses on mainstream holiday options and offers comprehensive navigation. The design is a little corporate but there is an attractive headline font used to soften the layout somewhat. As common with most travel sites, their content can be consumed through third parties and I found the site after clicking through on an offer on a Cheap Flights weekly email. This dynamic republishing of content is common in the travel industry with many brands overlapping and the same offers appearing in many locations.

The Asda Travel site, thankfully, has more measured use of descriptions in their copy compared to some other operators. The tone is informative and interesting without slipping too often into the hackneyed, adjective laden copy, more typical of holiday content – must-see attractions, dizzying choices and mouth watering food being some of the tired phrases that make me reach for the Back button, if not the sick bag.

Thomson Holidays
www.thomson.co.uk

And talking about hackneyed, adjective laden copy, let’s look at the exotic and unsurpassed experience that is the fantastic Thomson Holidays web site. See what I did there? Yes this is the home of dead-weight, unimaginative copy. Let me provide an example:

When it comes to mealtimes at BeachClub, the choice is dizzying. From laid-back snack bars by the pool and exciting theme nights to world cuisine and a la carte restaurants, you'll find plenty of enticing eateries to tempt your taste buds. There's something for everyone - even those fussy little eaters! Drinks are on tap from dawn to dusk, too - whether it's a cold beer, colourful cocktails or a frothy coffee... More.

I particularly like the exclamation point after ‘fussy little eaters’. More? Er, no I don’t think so.

Still, the site has good tools for navigation and a wide range of holiday options. The images are pretty good and the site does build excitement towards holidays. The home page is gorgeous and I love the wraparound picture enclosing the content. The first impression is very positive – slick look and feel.

The destinations tab takes you first to a rotating globe which you can pause at areas of interest and click through to find more content. It looks very nice but I wonder how necessary it actually is? I’ll trust that Thomson Holidays have done their homework and this navigation embellishment actually helps their customers. I’d have been happy with a flat map or even a panel per continent. In any event, selecting a continent offers the countries that you can select. These are accompanied by video highlights but the display size is too small to be able to make a sensible selection. Of course there’s always the copy to fall back on. Here’s what they have to say about Italy:

‘Soul-stirring cities, world famous art, waist-expanding food and drink – holidays to Italy will captivate you from the word go.’

I really think they could do better than this. And that’s really how I feel about the site – nice to look at but could do better.

Number 10
www.number10.gov.uk

Connect with Gordon and stay up to date with the message from 10 Downing Street. That seems to be the essence of the Number 10 digital strategy. Perhaps I’m deceiving myself but this site reads much more honestly than I expected. The message appears to be informational rather than distorted and biased. There is lots of content, frequently updated, covering events at Number 10 each day. Policy announcements and details of engagements make up the majority of the content but there does appear to be a real attempt to be open.

This is a nice site aimed at keeping the UK population up to date with the events at 10 Downing Street. You could easily go to one of the excellent news sites such as Times Online or Guardian but there are some interesting things that you only get here. Firstly you get the government view, which might be good or it might be bad, but it is a view. Second you can get a link to Twitter to follow the PM’s movements and announcements. Thirdly and most importantly, you can find out which petitions are currently circulating and digitally sign-up for them. So if you believe in a topic, add your name to the petition and see if people power can move the topic up the political agenda.

This is an interesting experiment in communication, bringing politics to the people in a tangible way, unsullied by party political attack politics and shouting matches during Prime Minister’s Questions. It is easy to register and confirm your interest in a petition and you get immediate confirmation. Nice.

The design is a big upgrade on some of the other government online properties (I’m looking directly at you, HM Revenue & Customs) and is maintained regularly. The language is accessible (pay attention HMRC) and the tone is informative. The Twitter feed sends occasional announcements which act as a good driver to return to the site. Some Twitter feeds, e.g. ESPN are so voluminous that if you don’t visit Twitter for a day, you have a page full of ESPN updates and little from your friends. Not that Gordon is my friend, though it would be nice to have a one-to-one, wouldn’t it? – ask all those questions in private that wouldn’t get answered in public, get a sense of the person behind the position.