steve kwan user experience designer

Here's an irritating website

(February 1st, 2006 - 12:21PM)

Kate Bush is a great musician; in fact, if you haven't heard her new album Aerial, I recommend you buy it. Unfortunately, her website is a disaster. Here are some of my complaints.

• The site is one big Flash animation. This causes several problems, namely:
  
  
  1. the site requires a third-party extension
  2. the site pages can't be bookmarked because all the sections are contained in a single application
  3. the site text can't be indexed by search engines.
• The site has background music, which is just irritating. There's no way to turn it off.
• I have to wait for all the images on the screen to slowly fade into existence before I can do anything.
• The navigation menu pops in and out of existence and is extremely difficult to control.
• The text does not have enough contrast with the background, making it difficult to see.
• There is a "View site in HTML" option, but unfortunately it's embedded into the Flash animation. If you didn't have Flash, you couldn't see that option and might have difficulty finding the HTML version.