Browsers and design – Photoguard.co.uk
Whilst looking for camera insurance, I stumbled across www.photoguard.co.uk. And I bet you can just guess what’s coming next …
A (short) critique of www.photoguard.co.uk
Firstly, this is clearly quite an established business – and a very niche one at that. Photographers have a lot of expensive kit to lug around, and need a specific policy to cover the various aspects of their equipment and travel. And being photographers, it’s reasonable to assume that they’ll be a) creative, and b) have a good eye for composition and design.
So why, then, is the homepage of this site – the first entry point for users, the first impression they’ll get…why is it a bit broken?! Read on!
Browsers & your audience
So, bits of the homepage look like this in Firefox 3 – broken and disjointed. And in IE 6, which still has a sizeable share of the browser market, it’s still split up and incomplete-looking. Without wanting to go into this review too hard’n'fast, this kind of easily-fixed aesthetic screw up is pretty unforgivable. The audience – the picky artistic photographers – will be instantly turned off when they see a site that looks broken, yet purports to insure their expensive photography kit.
It’s also not unreasonable to assume that photographers will be looking at these sites on browsers like Firefox & Safari as most of them will be using Apple Macs.
Clicking into the Photoguard option, the entire look and feel of the site changes. So already we have a jolting journey that leaves the user unsure if this is the same site/company.
The Photoguard site has clearly been designed for 800x600, which may be a decision based in knowledge of their visitor stats…but I’m guessing is more likely to be because the site was built a few years ago when 800×600 was the average browser resolution (or it was built by a designer who hasn’t seen the updated stats yet).
Again, since the audience here will likely be high-end computer users who have their 22″ LCD monitors at the highest possible resolution, that site will be like a postage stamp in the top left of their screen!
Where’s the rest of the post? They’re usually longer!
I’m keeping this one short, because it’s late, and something’s burning in my kitchen…
George
George Rosier runs this blog. It's somewhere he can vent his spleen about web design, usability, SEO, and other such nonsense that will no doubt mean nothing in 5 years' time.