I was looking at the website of Yellowdoor, the retail consultancy run by Mary Portas, Queen Of Shops. I know she could transform the fortunes of the little shop my wife and I own; I know this agency is far more successful at PR than I could ever hope to be. So in a way, I feel who am I to criticise? However I have to say, their website is not very good.
See for yourself. Firstly, you have to click to get anywhere, which is always a frustration. So, click on the Retail Strategy page, though it could be any of them. The first thing you have to tackle is the tiny difficult-to-read type, made even worse because white out of brown is always going to be less easy to read that black out of white. Then there’s the counter-intuitive scrolling- the arrow at the bottom pointing down makes the page scroll to the top and the upward pointing arrow at the top takes you down. When you try to read, there are distracting photos constantly scrolling up the left hand side.
Finally perhaps the worst sin because it’s the easiest to have got right- series of typographical errors- Shopping is another scence (presumably ‘science’)… We will apply out (our) expertise. There’s no excuse for not proofing properly.
Sticking with copy but turning to the About Us page, it seems Mary Portas’ newspaper column ‘will be a launch pad for a National Shop Awards in 2006”- ‘was’ surely. You must keep your website up-to-date or your company looks inefficient and unreliable.
As happens so often, clever design has triumphed over usability. I am pretty sure that this would not be true of Yellowdoor’s retail consultancy work but a website like this just creates that little doubt.
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