Ster Kinekor have recently, um, done something awful to their website. They haven’t redesigned it but someone in their marketing department got hold of it and just plain ruined it.
Background:
The Ster Kinekor website was designed by Prezence, maybe 3 or more years ago, in about 2007. When it came out it was the cutting edge of Flash development in South Africa. Prezence made a site that popped and buldged and was just generally awesome, and yet all of the info on the site is dynamic. If you know anything about developing for the web you know that this is pretty remarkable. The cool cyan & chrome look was, and still is, really slick.
Screen sizes:
The Ster Kinekor site, and the Nu Metro site (which still does things this way) were set up to fill a normal 1024 resolution monitor, because that’s generally what folks used a couple of years ago, but they used the background area to the right and left to place nice big skyscraper ads so that people on bigger screens got a full, big website.
Ster Kinekor have gone and reduced the functional area (where you might, for example, look for a movie to watch) down to 770px wide. Awesome if you’re one of the 5 people in the country on a monitor with an 800 x 600 resolution. Just irritating and fiddly and cramped if you’re everyone else.
So: Why fiddly little site? Yup: Advertising. In order to make space for the banners at the top and down the side, they’ve made the bit of the site that you want to use really small and, well, just a little bit more difficult to use.
Is it worth it?
I’m assuming that the Ster Kinekor website gets a few hundred thousand visits every month, which is a hell of a lot. Obviously it’s tempting to place ads on the site – you’re going to be able to sell that top banner for a lot of money. That’s all well & good, but Ster Kinekor have taken it too far – they sell movie tickets, and that should be the most important thing that happens on their website. Currently the most important thing is a R34 iPad from smokoo.com.
Other tid-bits:
The site no longer supports the non www domain – so if you’re cool and type in “sterkinekor.co.za” you get no-where.
The site used to be .co.za, and now it’s .com – presumably for all those Americans who want to book for Big Mommas House at Gateway. This is akin to the SAA website which has the remarkably stupid URL of http://www.flyssa.com.
The Design Review 