bbc

AudioGo: site review

June 15, 2012 in All posts, review

I’ve decided to investigate downloading some audio editions of my favourite books. I don’t get time to read, so I reason this is the best way of absorbing more of my favourite titles during my commute.

AudioGo are ‘the home of BBC audiobooks‘, so this seems like a good place to start. How did I get on? Find out!

First impressions

The AudioGo site is, on the face of it, a pretty good-looking site. The quality of imagery is generally high, and the colours generally compliment each other well (albeit accidentally).

Clicking into any of the banners on the homepage takes you to the catalogue of that particular author, but they’re not targetted or specifically-designed landing pages – they’re simply search result pages. They also don’t seem to tag their banners with analytics code, so I’m guessing they can’t tell which banners were the most popular…but that’s a guess.

Oddly, the ‘Mark Watson’s “Live address to the nation” link on the right of the homepage seems to error: http://www.audiogo.com/uk/mark-watsons-live-address-to-the-nation-episode-1/

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On the analytics point, they seem to have implemented the Google Analytics code at the top of the page code instead of the bottom. Not sure if that’s intentional, but generally Google Analytics best practice is to stick it before the closing </body> tag.

Sticking with the code for a moment, there also seems to be some strange source code left in the site:

 var Translator = new Translate({"Please enter a valid phone number. For example (123) 456-7890 or 123-456-7890.":"Please enter a valid phone number. For example 01234 567890, (123) 456-7890 or 123-456-7890.","Please enter a valid email address. For example johndoe@domain.com.":"Please enter a valid email address. For example johndoe@example.com.","Please enter a valid zip code. For example 90602 or 90602-1234.":"Please enter a valid postcode or zip. For example AB1 1AB, 90602 or 90602-1234.","Please enter a valid zip code.":"Please enter a valid postcode or zip.","Please enter a valid $ amount. For example $100.00.":"Please enter a valid \u00a3 amount. For example \u00a3100.00.","Please select State\/Province.":"Please select County\/State.","Please use only letters (a-z or A-Z), numbers (0-9) or underscore(_) in this field, first character should be a letter.":"Please use only letters (a-z or A-Z), numbers (0-9) or underscores (_) in this field, first character must be a letter.","Your session has been expired, you will be relogged in now.":"Your session has expired, you will be re-logged in now."});

Mobile

There’s a rudimentary mobile site, too:

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This is a good start, but it’s not a responsive design (i.e as the browser shrinks, the web page ‘degrades’ gracefully into a mobile-compatible version). I think this is a real missed-trick here, as this could be alienating a large number of users. More & more people are visiting using mobile – and given that AudioGo seem relatively active on Twitter, it makes sense to have a properly optimised mobile site.

I’m not quite sure what value the Paypal banner ads, either. It opens a new window that simply preaches the virtues of Paypal…

Also, the very first link on the page returns a blank result:

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Given this is the very first link – and indeed the bestsellers – surely this should work?

Deeper pages

The product pages seem to have lots of dead space, and a strange product detail right-hand-side panel. It seems somewhat … empty and slightly pointless? Why not move the ‘Product info’ box up above the page fold?

Looking quickly at the search page – in particular the advanced search – it seems to be an inordinately long and daunting task:

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This would easily put many people off: there’s loads of unnecessary search options in there, and they’re book-ended by a load of pre-defined results. Strange.

Navigation

The in-page navigation is generally good, but most annoyingly, on a Mac Air (or any other laptop with small screen), the mega drop-down disappears off the page, leaving you unable to see the rest of the content:

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Other oddities

• Bizarre top 10 (some don’t have any ratings, and there’re filter controls at the bottom of the page which are sort of pointless):

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• Email newsletter page refers to ‘Customer My Account Mage Monkey’ in the breadcrumb:

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• For some reason, the site drops in and out of SSL: you may as well force HTTPS across the whole site rather than popping it in & out.
• Weird SEO sitemap: http://www.audiogo.com/uk/catalog/seo_sitemap/product – given it’s paginated, I’d debate the value of this page.