August 7, 2008
When I review an agency site for “The Crit” I look for examples that perform well on at least one or two of the four criteria I consider most important for a successful agency website: positioning, content, platform, and design.
I’m making an exception for this post. This agency website fails on all counts. My intention is not to poke fun at this agency. In fact, I’ve gone to great lengths to obscure their identity. I’m also not linking to the site, instead I’ve recorded a screencast and blurred out all identifying information. I’d also appreciate that if anyone happens to recognize this site, please do not name the agency in the comments. Instead just ask yourself if any of these failures can be found in your own agency’s site, and if so, fix them.
One thing that cannot be seen in the screencast is the irritating (and all too common) practice among agency sites of automatically maximizing or resizing my browser window. A previous blog post was a rant against this practice so I won’t need to express my irritation again. But adding insult to injury this site not only maximizes my browser window, but it begins a 2.7MB Flash file download. Perhaps with the ubiquity of broadband these days this practice is not as presumptuous as it used to be. But I happen to know that this site has been online in its present form for some time–well before a 2.7MB was considered lightweight. Still, it’s bad form.
The site gets a third strike even before we get passed the intro. It begins playing a music automatically. There is a small sound toggle button, but we’re treated to an earful before we can locate the off button. I’ve shortened the music in the embedded screencast’s, so you won’t have to listen for long.
The site ironically provides a “Skip intro” link, but it does not show up in the animated sequence until well after the download finishes, after the music starts playing, and the intro animation is halfway finished.
If it wasn’t my job to help agencies with web strategy I would have bailed on this site before the preloader ever finished. But since it is my job, I stuck it out and analyzed the rest of the site. Let’s examine it from The Crit’s four criteria.
Positioning. Quite simply there is none. They define themselves as a “marketing and communications” firm with services that run the gamut. Even the “About Us” section offers no distinctives. Instead they begin asking about “Your Customers,” “Your Clients,” and “Your Audience.” This might be appropriate text for a process page, but I’d like to know a bit more about what makes Anonymous Associates the right fit for my business, what makes then different? The only thing they say about themselves is that they “ask questions” and “think.” This fails the “I would hope so” positioning test. If after hearing a positioning statement you could respond “I would hope so!,” it fails. Who wouldn’t ask questions and think. This is hardly a differentiating position.
Sometimes an agency’s client list is more revealing about the firms actual positioning than the agency is willing to state outright. Anonymous Associates lists many clients in Real Estate. They also list clients under Service and Financial, and Corporate and Manufacturing. Based on the list I think with a little work and a bit of boldness they could define a more strategic positioning. I wouldn’t be surprised to learn that they claim and demonstrate expertise in real estate marketing when they pitch new real estate clients. But the site takes no advantage of this expertise.
Content. Aside from one press release (from February of 2007) in the “All The News” section of the site (which is the only news in this section) the entire site contains just over five hundred words. Most of these words are found on the directions page. You’ve already read more words in this blog post. Their portfolio contains nice images of their work but the descriptions of the work consist of one sentence each, all they all follow the same formula “When the [client name] wanted to [stated goal], ANONYMOUS AGENCY DID IT.”
Platform. Since the site’s platform is entirely Flash based, which usually ensures a failing grade, there’s not a lot else to say here. Except for one curious detail I’m suspicious about. I can’t be sure, but it looks like the text in the Flash movie has a bit of a jpeg halo around the letters. Meaning the words are not text in Flash, but rather embedded graphics of text in Flash. If this is the case Google’s recent announcement that it will begin indexing Flash movies will not benefit this site at all, since the “text” is still in graphic form, thus invisible to search.
Design. I’ll go easy on the design. I’m not a fan of the visual design, its definitely very old. It also typifies the agency inclination to use impact visuals rather sharing expert ideas–a common symptom of the “creativity barrier.” The information design fails. The browser resize, forced download, and music on start would be enough to fail the site. But they also add animated transitions to every section, an annoying practice that wastes the visitor’s time. They have not, however, committed the mistake of creatively labeling the main navigation bar titles. They’ve kept to normal and obvious labels: About Us, Our Work, Our Clients, etc. So I guess it doesn’t fail on all counts, it fails on all counts minus one.
I don’t like being an unduly critical critic. But because so many agency sites make mistakes like those pointed out in this review, I thought this post would make a good mirror to hold up in evaluating agency sites. Your agency site might not be as old looking, and maybe you have better taste in music, but the impulses, failures, and framework for this kind of agency site are sadly typical. And this needs to change.
