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