Site review: Virgin Holidays ‘Weddings’ section

February 15, 2010 in All posts, review

Hello! I’ve not written a scathing review of a website for a while, so I thought I’d drop this little gem on you.

For one reason and another, I was recently forced inclined to look for more information regarding weddings abroad – specifically in the Caribbean. Drop ‘caribbean wedding‘ into Google, and the Virgin Holidays (www.virginholidays.co.uk) brand appeared top of the results. Having worked for Mr Branson in the past (and generally thinking his products are pretty good), I went and had a look.

How did I get on? Was the site virginal, or did it more resemble a loose woman of the night? Read on…

First impressions

Not good. The main issue I have with this site (and really you can probably stop reading after this paragraph as it contains the synopsis of my rage) is that the entire weddings section of the site is presented in a shockingly crap embedded PDF/brochure arrangement – complete with epically tacky ‘turnable pages’ instead of … oh I dunno: usable navigation, maybe?

Why do this? It’s bad for navigation, bad for spiderability, and bad for user experience. It would not surprise me in the slightest if people were dropping out of this content at a massive rate.

And, Richard, just for your information: No one wants to be forced into entering their email address just for the privilege of being led around this farcical merry-go-round of a website:

That’s right: you’re not allowed to carry on in to the content unless you provide a valid email address. What the hell? So after entering an entirely fake email address (yep: I’m a rebel), I’m allowed into the hallowed sanctuary of the Weddings content.

Before that, though, I thought I’d find out why they wanted my email address, and clicked on the ‘Further details’ link (which, let’s be fair, is hardly descriptive and doesn’t really indicate that this is where a user should click if they want to find out why Virgin are harvesting their email addresses).

Sure enough, I’m led to the privacy page, which proudly tells me the only 4 instances where Virgin will ever want my email address are:

1. When making an online booking (which I’m not)
2. When ordering a brochure (which I’m not)
3. When signing up for email updates (…which I’m not)
4. When applying for jobs using an application form (guess what? I’M NOT.)

If I were a lesser being (which I’m not – hah look: continuity humour!), I’d perhaps be concerned at this stage that something were amiss with the Virgin website and perhaps I was giving over my email address to unscrupulous hackers, since I wasn’t doing any of the things listed above…yet was still being asked for my email address.

Bad journey so far, and we’re not even in the content. Great start, Virgin.

Usability and navigation

Using this embedded brochure, the user is presented with this bizarre website-within-a-website effect: three sets of navigation (browser, embedded left/right buttons, and a right-hand tabbed affair), complete with tacky page-turning effect and tiny font size.

It is abundantly clear at this stage that, instead of developing a good quality website for happy couples to explore and find out more about what Virgin can offer them, they’ve instead opted to simply digitalise their offline brochure and stick it on a webpage. My personal rule #1 of website design:

Offline designs do not often work online.

Why? Because your audience, and how they want to use/interact with the medium, is completely different between off- and online. Interaction is the keyword here, and trying to replicate an offline brochure in an online space is, frankly, retarded.

Flicking through a printed brochure is part of the experience: looking for any nice pictures or headlines that catch your eye, passing it over to the missus so she can make wilting and unfair comments about the bride in that particular picture looking like a horse…that kind of thing.

Similarly, it’s also fair to assume that if your reader is on a fact-find mission, they’ll persevere a little since a) the brochure is in their hands, and b) usual stuff like prices and related crap is generally at the back in a big, hard-to-understand table. It’s all part of the printed glossy thing. People know what to expect.

Websites are different and need to be treated as such.

• There’s less time for fannying about, as users make decisions much quicker on the web
• There’s no loyalty: Google is just a click away, and therefore so are your competitors
• There may be a higher degree of fact-finding involved in an online mission (as there was in mine), and the information needs to be laid out differently – and be way more findable and accessible

This brochure tries to lead the user through offline bullsh!t, and really just gets in the way of actual useful content. Here’s the first page:

How is this of any use to anyone? Tiny text, massive imagery, a table of contents that – whilst it does actually link to the right pages – is not obvious that it’s clickable! Plus you have to zoom in to read anything, which then makes navigating round the rest of the page a complete faff.

Add to this the fact that there’s no noscript alternative, and you’ve got a completely inaccessible site. Wonderful.

Final thoughts

There are one or two parts of the site which are ‘regular’ HTML, in that they can be accessed without the need to dive into this shitty brochure, but they don’t contain much (if any) useful information. Being forced down a badly designed, badly executed and technically inaccessible site is really bad practice.

Virgin Weddings: you’re officially a slutty loose woman of the night. Fail.

Tags: review, usability, virgin holidays