Review of Associated Press (www.ap.org) site
Whilst looking for some news story providers, I decided to check out the AP (Associated Press) site, www.ap.org. I was after some quick info about news story feeds/aggregation, and possibly some stock imagery.
What happened on my thrilling journey? What was their site like? I know you can’t wait to find out, really. It’s the only thing that’s keeping you going, isn’t it? Admit it. It’s fine.
Read my (admittedly brief) review here!
First impressions
Unfortunately, the first impressions of this site are not good. To start, the AP logo is fuzzy and not well-optimised, and ragged round the edges. Call me picky, but this is probably one of the first things users will see – and for such a large organisation, this kind of amateur faux-pas is easily avoidable.
Looking further down, the site is designed to be a left-aligned, fixed-width affair and is really not pretty to look at. A left column houses a weak, small, text-as-images navigation structure that went out of fashion about 7 years ago.
Add to that the following litany of complaints:
- Depending on where you are in the site, the logo sends you to a different homepage, with a different logo! This is really poor in terms of accepted convention, and general user journey.
- As an addition to the above, depending on where you are in the site, the left nav can change. Here vs here, for example.
- Not only that, but without warning the site will send you to completely different URLs – even when clicking on seemingly integral (i.e not out of the ordinary) navigation items. Again, here vs here (same links as above).
- No favicon. Minor, but obvious. Even MY site has a favicon. Sort it out.
- There is virtually no hierarchy or direction. For example, a link to ‘Buying AP News’ – something which I’d have thought to be a very important, integral aim of the site – has the same weight as ‘Follow us on Twitter’.
- Continuing from that, it seems like there’s the serious need for thought regarding the overall aims of site. At the moment, it’s hard to see what the hell is their main goal for this place.
- It’s built in tables. Urgh.
Structure and layout
As we go deeper into the site, different product pages are – at least – laid out consistently. Unfortunately, they’re consistently bad. Tiny text, dated imagery and hemmed-in text makes these pages look seriously unhappy. Poor, poor little webpages. Look for yourself:
Due to the tight left-aligned dimensions, the right nav encroaches hugely into the main body content’s space, and makes the copy look squashed and harder to read than if it were spaced out properly.
Happily (?) though, if you were after AP pictures, they hand you off into the rather lovely AP Images site…which looks completely different. Usually, I’d slate this kind of inconsistent journey, but because the parent site is so poor I think it’s a vast improvement. Go see the AP Images site for yourself here.
Clicking the ‘AP video services’ link takes you to AP digital…which is a completely different site, and appears to be a dead-end. It’s really not clear at all where to go to actually buy video clips or similar. Also – confusingly – this site talks about ‘images’ too. Isn’t that what AP Images is for?!
Conclusions
I won’t go on. As you can tell, the site is dated, badly laid-out, has a poor customer journey and really – really – needs it’s goals reviewing, as currently it’s not clear why the hell it even exists.
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.