“Above the fold” is a terminology used by the print world. In my not so humble opinion it does not belong in the web world. Print and web are NOT the same. They have been nor will they be.

If I cannot tell what your business is about just by looking at your website I won’t explore, and nor will anyone else. Well some will. You need to generate excitement.

Finally, people do scroll once you have captured their interest. Oh, and leave mystery meat navigation out. You need clearly defined navigation.

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

More and more ISP’s are starting to blacklist various IPs and email addresses. I am all for eliminating spam but not at the expense of legitimate businesses. Three well known ISPs that are doing this are AOL, Comcast and Earthlink. So if you use an email address for your business that is @aol.com, @comcast.com or @comcast.net, and finally @earthlink.net you may very well not receive email from clients.

Eathlink will often send someone an email stating that this person only accepts email from approved addresses with a link to send a message to add your address. Let’s put it this way if someone contacts me and I reply and get such a message well I might request approval, but 9 of 10 times I won’t.

If you have a web based business use an email address with the domain name in it, and don’t have it forwarded to another email address. Why risk losing a customer?

Comcast and the problems one small ISP had http://www.techpro.com/content/not_comcastic.aspx.

One of the simplest of things is to use a business email address versus an Earthlink or AOL or other ISP address. In addition, it just plain appears more professional.

Quite often when an interview takes place a contact email address will be in the news article but not the URL of the business. So get and use an email address that has your domain name in it.

And don’t tell me or anyone else that it’s too difficult or time consuming to check it. I know that you can retrieve your domain email (POP) via Hotmail, Gmail and others.

Not using a business email address that contains your domain name and then checking the email account is not a good practice. Also, don’t have your email forwarded to an ISP or other provider such as Yahoo, MSN or Yahoo. It doesn’t take anymore time to login into your web mail for your domain. Besides it looks unprofessional not to use an email address with your domain name in it.

If your domain or a client’s has been blacklisted by one of the big boys you’re not going to receive messages from some of your clients (existing or new). That is not good for business.

Another thing I’m starting to advise against is having an email link on websites, using standard info@, support@, webmaster@, sales@ as they are such spam magnets. Use a form that prevents spam bots and mail injection instead.

Quite often when a business owner is interviewed and the article published an email address will be in the news article but not the URL of the business.