Good grief!. Have you seen the new Cotswold Outdoor website?. This is a new URL and a completely new monstrosity:- one of those appalling websites written entirely in Flash.
If you go to the old .co.uk URL, all you get is a screen from the parasitic TradeDoubler website.
For a start, I have the FlashBlock extension installed on my Firefox browser to keep this crap at bay normally. When I grudgingly click the play button, it takes a long time to load and my mouse cursor disappears for the duration, which really got me rattled - this is not the way to endear potential customers.
When it finally loads, in the bottom right of the screen there is a button labelled “Accessible site”, which takes you to a separate HTML version of the site without the cursed Flash - this is the page you get if Flash Player is not installed. This site displays a self-important demeaning message to the reader:
“You are currently viewing our accessible site which has limited functionality. In order to enjoy the full Cotswold Outdoor shopping experience you will need to download Flash Player 9″
This should read:
“You are currently viewing our accessible site which behaves as you would expect. If you wish to wreck your Cotswold Outdoor shopping experience completely, you will need to download Flash Player 9″.
The very fact that they have a separate accessible site is a total indictment of the design - every commercial site should be accessible as a matter of course. No doubt some marketing hack had the bright idea that the old site was not… well… flashy enough, and a new gee-whizz site with slick Flash graphics would impress people no end (the worst of it may be that they are right).
FlashBlock is one of the most popular plugins for Firefox - there is a very good reason for that.
We bought quite a lot of our stuff from Cotswold and still do occasionally, we have a 10% discount card and know some of the guys at the shop. I won’t be able to resist a little hint next time I’m in.
13 Comments
I like it ! It’s easy to use. It takes a while to load, but is very fast when loaded !
This will be a success and will increase their sales.
See what you mean! Couldn’t get it to load at ALL in Opera. Came up in Firefox, probably designed by some bright spark who thinks that all the side bars sliding in and out would look terribly modern rather than just annoying and difficult to use. And some of the tips abd guides point to pages that aren’t there yet. Not impressed.
Well I’m not the only one, take a look at this thread on the Trail forum.
As I mention there you can’t change the text size which is a real problem for some people, and you can’t bookmark individual pages within the site, which is a big nuisance - on return you have to start over at the top level and drill down to find it again.
The new site gives me nothing that standard HTML can’t. We’ll never know for sure how this affects sales, but maybe they should consider that Flash content is not searchable by search engines.
Chalk me up as another of the unimpressed.
It doesn’t like my Firefox/W2K/coal-fired-laptop combination, it won’t load fully, it causes a 4-minute system-hang.
I’ve not managed to load enough to see if there’s an option to skip directly to a HTML version. Have any of you lot found such an option?
Maybe I’ll just phone ‘em up and ask for an old-fashioned paper catalogue - it might be a quicker option.
Hi BG.
There is a link to their ‘Accessible Site’ once the Flash thing has loaded, which obviously doesn’t help anybody having trouble with loading it!. After digging around in their code I worked out a URL, try this link.
Cheers, Geoff, that’s a lot better.
I agree… i thik its hopeless. I even struggle loading it in IE and so cant even get the the html version.
If it wasnt for the link above to the HTML version, my only option would be to shop online elswhere and save my discount for when im near to a store..
I’d love to understand the financial impact of this disastrous website on Costwold’s recent sales. I totally give up ( and I’m far from non-technical ). One day it works with Firefox (slow and so clunky though) and the next day it doesn’t. For some reason ( and I don’t care cos I rarely use IE) it only brings up the non-flash version and - I just discovered - although you can browse and “add to basket”, the order process just is NOT there are you are told to go to the Flash versions !
It’s even worse than I thought then!. Add-to-basket seems to work but no Checkout… people will really be brassed off. Fortunately I don’t use the website to buy anything, I go to the Manchester shop and use my 10% discount card.
I know this is an old post but just wanted to say I couldn’t agree more with the conclusions you came to about their website, it is a complete disaster. I had so many problems with it that I eventually just gave up and went elsewhere. I even sent them an email, stating my complete frustration with it. I did not get a reply. Since the website is still up, I am guessing it is working enough for them, but I’m pretty sure they have lost a hell of a lot of potential revenue by employing such poor user usability.
As well as alienating potential customers, they must be suffering a lot from a lack of Google results because it can’t search the site properly. I often use Google to look for outdoor kit at UK retailers and Cotswold never comes up in the results.
My experience was nowhere near as positive.
1: I could not access anything on the flash site
2: My wife however stumbled across the ‘flash site’ and posted me a URL … turned out to be total junk..the URLs of the flash site are not portable / usable.
3: I wanted to look at one of the videos (which turn out to be simple .mpg) … but hidden/buggered out with by a flash axtivex applet (surely nobody would allow these to run?) … anyhow it turned out the actual .mpg was missing …just could see that as the flash stuff didn’t seem to spot the error
…mind you it could be worse (and probably will be) what are the odds they’s do it in MS silverlight!
http://www.pcpro.co.uk/blogs/2009/07/30/silverlight-not-so-flash-for-microsoft/
Yes, Silverlight - that’s yet another application to cause difficulty. I never use the Cotswold site now, fortunately they have a branch in my nearest city Manchester.