(White)Space: The final frontier - Routeone.co.uk

This week, I’ve decided to take a look at the website of one of the most well-known skatewear retailers: Route One. I’ve long been a fan of skatewear in it’s various incarnations, so a recent visit to this site left me in a bit of shock. Don’t misunderstand me: it’s not a BAD site by any means, but it’s definitely in need of some heavy-handed reworking of the navigational priorities and the graphic elements.

Fascinating, I’m sure you’ll agree. I clearly need to get out more!

A critique of www.routeone.co.uk

So, from a high-level, it’s fair to say that graphically it’s quite nice…but it’s somewhat lacking in decent site templates to make the most of the colour scheme, products and logos that are currently stacked all over the place. The navigation could also do with reworking a bit. Read on…

I’m gonna do things the other way round this time. Where I’d normally talk about site structures and so on, I’m going to jump straight into aesthetics - because on this site, they’re the most striking issues.

Design templates & elements

The homepage is quite striking, but for the wrong reasons: whilst the central promo area is very attention-grabbing, it’s competing for dominance in an already crowded page. The comic-book style is great and quite well executed, but clashes with the rest of the site’s templates. Combine that with a long scrolling page, and an excess of bright colours, and it becomes overbearing.

Navigating one level into the site, and the whole look-and-feel changes. Gone are the restricting left- and right-navs (which is good), and instead the results are displayed on a spaced-out white background (which is…well, bad!). A breadcrumb indicator of orange text on a white background (which is technically inaccessible according to the HP Colour Contrast tool) is the only indication of whereabouts you are in the site. Some thought needs to go into some decent templates in which to hold this content.

The colour scheme of the site (primarily orange, white and black with secondary grey) is really nice, but the site doesn’t make the most of it at present. There are colour contrast issues as it stands at the moment, but the whole thing has real potential to look much better.

Navigation

The right-nav contains nicely done brand logos in grey & white, but they’re stacked too high with no clear prioirity given to the most popular vs the alphabetical list. Whilst I like the grey / white scheme, they all mash into one confusing stack - because they’re ALL the same colour.

Conversely, the left-nav is composed of much smaller text links, crammed in together under various section headings such as Mens, Womens, Accessories, Skateboarrds and so on . This data categorisation is good, but the links need sorting out and making bigger. Which ones to make bigger is a job for the site stats owner: finding out what site visitors want to do when they hit the site is the priority, and then make the most popular destination category the most prominent.

The top-nav is essentially a replication of the left-nav. This is a bit confusing, and is potentially an unecessary replication of nav elements. It drives what looks like a DHTML/Javascript menu navigation, which is quite nice but - due to the way the site is built - the menu contents are the first thing a disabled screenreader will read: no site descritor, no ’skip navigation’ link, just straight into “Accessories”, “Bags” etc. More annoyingly, screenreaders will have to plough through all of that each and every time they hit a deeper page in the site.

Talking of the way the site’s built, the whole thing is built in tables. This will also pose a challenge for screenreaders and is not ideal.

Too much space vs not enough

There’s almost two sites in one here: one which is represented by the homepage, and is a full-on smash of messages, colour and logos…and the other - just one level in - is a sparsely populated, minimalist vision of boredom. Bit weird, all told!

There’s far more to this, too: the transactional pages leave a bit to be desired, the templates could be dived into much more, and the Information Architecture (IA) grouping could be better implemented.

Overall it’s not a bad site, but it could be much better.

5/10
See me afterwards.

;)

July 2, 2008 | Filed Under All posts

 

Comments

Leave a Reply