Two well known South African websites have recently undergone face-lifts, one more successfully than the other.
Nando’s, one of my favourite chicken fast-food outlets, have gone the ‘aesthetics first, award-winning’ route. They have a full flash site with a non-standard experiential navigation.
When the craving for Nando’s awesome peri-peri wings hits, I need to satisfy it immediately so I usually turn to Google to help me find the nearest branch. Considering that about 60% of Internet users begin their browsing with a Google search, Search engine friendliness is a fundamentally important part of any company’s online presence.
If you Google ‘Peri-peri chicken’ or ‘Nando’s restaurants’ the top Search Results click through to pages that display a 404 Error (page not found). This means that, potentially, more than half of chicken fans searching for Nando’s online may not find it.
The website itself is good-looking, but unfortunately it seems they did not consider their primary audience: hungry people looking for a place to order chicken. It is very heavy on bandwidth; on a standard 384kbps iBurst line, it took me almost 4 minutes and 4.9Mb to load the site, open the delivery menu and find a branch to order from. By the time I got to the “Our restaurants” page my stomach was rumbling in anticipation of those wings but I struggled to use the restaurant locator, the text on the page is hardly legible and the controls are difficult to use.
Luckily the site can be made friendlier without too much trouble. The 404 errors can be easily remedied with 301 redirects and usability can be improved by introducing HTML navigation, changing the fonts and GUI controls and reducing the file sizes of the downloadable menus. There are a few other things that can be done to optimise the site, but I’m not giving everything away here! ;-)
The other face-lift of note was to News24.com, South Africa’s biggest website. With over 1,3 million visitors a month, revamping News24 must have been no mean feat. The team who shed blood, sweat and tears to create the site must be congratulated! It is clean, light and easy to navigate while still looking great. The new News24.com structure is very ‘blog-like’ and uses lots of great Social Media tools like RSS, share buttons and a beefed up ‘MyNews24’ blog section.
News24 thought of their users when they redesigned their site. Elan Lohmann, Head of Social Networking and Communications for Naspers MIH Internet Africa said on his blog that, “The News24 redesign is not ground-breaking or incredible, it’s not original, it’s not going to win a prize for innovation – but it is profoundly significant in SA online history…".
Call me old-fashioned but when a company has a search-engine friendly, well structured and easy to use site, they make an instant fan out of me.
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Loving the post - great use of current examples while adding basic elements of redesign. Completely agree, the nandos site has no direction just a "flashy" design with poor functionality. I really look forward to seeing more of your posts :)
Posted by sarveshen on 2009/06/10