Several friends over at Facebook have commented and posted the link to the Cruzan Rum website. So I had to visit their site since it had been a couple of years.

Before I start my review I have to say that I do really love the design. It’s how the design was executed that I take major issue with.

The Bad aka “Why it should not be an all Flash website”

1. The site is Flash. That’s a huge problem. While there are “hidden” links they go nowhere. So it looks like there is only 1 page to the website. That is not a desirable web presence.
2. Design issues simply because it is Flash. Below are several screen shots taken at various screen resolutions and you can see the problems. Content can’t be seen in lower resolutions at all.
3. If you have a favorite section of the website you cannot bookmark it. While they do not have recipes on the website, and I think that would be a huge plus on the various different ways to use their great rum products.

Click on each image to view a full sized example.

640x480	800x600	1024x768
1366x768

What I would recommend doing if they truly intend on using the website as a marketing tool:

1. Keep certain Flash elements but only if they are truly do something useful and not as a gratuitous use of Flash
2. Use a jQuery mega menu for the navigation
3. Work on the “title” and META description tags. They need to be unique and relevant to the actual page content.
4. Move the site to a content management system. The more visible pages that a website the better, more pages makes search engines very happy, and quite frankly improves the chance of appearing in more search engine results.

As far as I can find there is no legal requirement to require a visitor to get past an age requirement for a website except for those falling under COPPA and that is typically for adult sexually related websites (pornography or dating). Then there is absolutely no true way to verify someone’s age when they visit a website. Kids fake their age all of the time.

The age requirement used on alcohol related websites is simply for “we’re trying” and the equivalent of the warning label of tobacco products. I can certainly understand the requirement if actual sales were occurring, but there isn’t any “tried and true” method even with the use of a credit card. I know my own son used mine without permission to setup hosting when he was much younger. And yes, he got into a lot of trouble with his mom.

References:

Advertising/Promotion on Facebook

COPPA

FTC and COPPA

Discus.org

The previous analogy for having a Flash splash page or a website completely built using Flash is that of a mime standing in front of a grocery store, and trying to tell you where the milk is.

Well my new one is go stand in a small closet at night after turning all of the lights off, close the door, and now what do you see? Nothing. Absolutely nothing.

If you can’t see anything how do you expect the search engine spiders to?

A fellow developer forwarded this and I have to agree with her. It is a great use of Flash and video, and is the online 2006 portfolio of illustrator/creative Dave Werner.

And no you do not want an all Flash website for a business, unless you’re an illustrator or creative. And if you have lots of updates….well thank you for all that money.

Flash is a very useful tool and when used correctly enhances a website. Unfortunately there are some that believe, incorrectly I might add, that their entire site should be Flash. Or maybe their web developer (groan) thought they could…well make a lot of money off of a client that is uneducated. Flash sites should “do” something interesting and not act as a “static” site.

Flash drawbacks:
You have to sit and wait for it to download.
It’s lousy for search engine optimization
You can’t bookmark or print anything.
It’s expensive to maintain.
You’ll use a lot more bandwidth.
It won’t print.
If you fall under the ADA it can’t be read by braille readers.

Bad/Poor Examples of Flash Usage
http://www.jflusvi.org/ Another problem with using Flash on a medical institution website is that they are required to follow ADA guidelines and Flash cannot be read by the machine readers used by visually impaired visitors.

Good or Fun Examples of Flash
http://www.firstbornmultimedia.com/
http://www.bubblynumbers.com/
http://www.jazzviolinist.com/
http://www.demetriosbride.com/

I love sexy underwear and after seeing an ad for Chantelle I decided to check out their website. Well the home page is all Flash and it just hangs and none of the links work. I checked it in Firefox and IE.

http://www.chantelle.com

So I looked up the contact info in WHOIS and will let them know. And it also irritates me when I type in the just domain name without the www in front of it and nothing appears except some silly message.