George Rosier's portfolio & blog site

After reading the rather good eConsultancy review of the recently relaunched M&S site, it got me in the mood for taking a look at what else was around in terms of online clothing retailers. I spotted an opportunity to review the website of high-street brand name River Island.

Now, I’m no fashionista (updating my blog as often as I do generally precludes me from that particular gang), so this could work one of two ways:

• I’ll have no preconceived ideas about what works as a fashion site and therefore be open to persuasion, or
• I’ll be even more rigorous in my critique and will show absolutely no mercy or hesitation in being mean about their online offering

Which will it be? Do you even have to ask? Read on!

First impressions:
The www.riverisland.com homepage layout looks alright in principle: a top nav, large main promo box for selling the hero product, right-hand secondary boxes, and tertiary promo boxes beneath the main. However, it also incorporates a lower nav which is just a bit…strange. More on that later.

The right-nav is pretty cluttered with small text and typefaces that don’t work so well on the web. It feels like someone’s trying to recreate offline/print creative on the web – a common mistake.

Also, the entirety of the homepage content is Flash-based, with no non-Flash alternative. This is incredibly bad for two reasons:

• It affects Accessibility
• Search engines won’t be able to find your content

River Island acknowledge the Accessibility angle, but even so it’s a bit of a poor show given this brand’s prominence (also, if you visit the site with JavaScript disabled, the site won’t work at all. Shocking, River Island!).

More worryingly, Google is blind to the content of this site. Try searching the web for … well, anything from River Island! Googling “site:www.riverisland.com suit” brings back one result – the homepage. Because it can’t find it’s way around using the Flash. This is, in my opinion, seriously damaging their online searchability – and as a result I’d imagine their paid search campaign costs are perhaps running much higher than they should be, since all their content should be findable for free.

Design and layout:
I won’t spend long on here because it’s clear that things are not rosy: however, here’s a few points to consider.

There’s not much space in which to do things: the layout size of the Flash container is pretty restrictive and doesn’t allow much space: the scrolling content in pretty unreadable in that small-a context.

The top-nav that needs clicking on to hide the rest of the content with an unintuitive menu is genius. Want to close the menu? You’d click away from it, wouldn’t you? Doesn’t work. You need to reclick on the menu item that spawned the thing in the first place to get rid of it.

Want to go back to the homepage from deeper in the site? You’d look for a logo wouldn’t you? They usually sit in the top left. Nope, not here. It’s an unassuming text link in the bottom left.

Want  to go back a level to where you were? You’d click the ‘Back’ button in your browser, wouldn’t you? No. You can’t. BECAUSE IT’S ALL IN FLASH. Gaaauurgh!

The takehome moral of the story? Web conventions are there for a reason.

Final thoughts:
River Island, this is pretty poor isn’t it? The site is actually pagerank 5, which is respectable in anyone’s book…but my god it could be so much more. My advice, order of activity:

• Get rid of the Flash (entirely, in my personal opinion)
• Get a good CMS
• Make the site accessible
• Get a decent web content manager/web designer
• Bring your products to life
• Make loads of money