Q5 / TASK 4C-1
1. Content problems on websites:
www.meerkatmagic.com – one of the worst sites I’ve ever tried to use, but the product has so much potential.
2. What sort problem is evident?
46 links on the homepage alone, all running consecutively left to right down the centre of the page.
Visually unappealing and colours are inappropriate for a nature / safari theme (gun metal grey)
Extremely poor-quality images and old-fashioned fonts.
Home page is endless. You just keep scrolling. There is no top menu navigation. No logical and simple flow of information.
Instead there are navigations menus down left and right side of the homepage, but with so much text and so many images stuffed in you miss the headers. There are no instructions and the calls to action “search this burrowâ€, are an attempt to be cute but actually cause you to miss the search function and aren’t applicable to a wide audience or a non-English speaking person. At one point the centre of the homepage is left blank but the side menus keep running.
Search kept leading to a site error page.
The free screen savers, e-cards aren’t free as advertised! When you click on them you are told it’s for friends and supporters only!
3. What is the negative impact for the user? The main purpose of the site - to get people coming to the Western Cape to come to Oudtshoorn and go on a meerkat tour - is completely lost! As a person visiting the site you would be looking for information you recognize. Meerkat man or magic isn’t instantly recognizable but Meerkat Manor the hit TV series is. Ditto Animal Planet and National Geographic. The site owner has worked with these organizations but fails to leverage off them to boost his credibility and exposure as a Meerkat expert on his homepage.
The tour booking information is virtually impossible to locate. Instead you are hit with banking details asking you to become a sponsor (and you haven’t even been on the tour yet!)
The result is you
HAVE to have a lot of time on your hands and be
desperate to see a wild meerkat to be prepared navigate through this website.
The poor level of usability will drive users away (maybe even think they’ve landed on the wrong site) and result in many lost bookings and business opportunities.
4. What could be done to improve the site?
• First the site owner needs to identify what the key purpose of the site will be. The whole site design needs to be redesigned, and simplified, clear navigation and logical content structure. Text, navigation structure and layout of images need to be balanced and given priority based on the purpose it serves.
• The site needs to be visually more appealing and attractive. Graphics and colours used in the site need to enhance the theme and the product.
• Furthermore the product is really emotive and this needs to come across with the use of clear, good quality eye-catching graphics. A short engaging video clip of the meerkats, possibly with an audio track, would convince prospective tour buyers far easier than a mass of text links.
• An animated banner with tour booking information or special promotions would give visitors a quick grasp of what they came to the site for and whet their appetites to read / search further.
• Search function must work.
• Calibre of the scientific organizations e.g. Nat Geo needs to feature more prominently as this will give his product credibility and potential buyer’s confidence.
• Client testimonials are a must, and would be even better if they came from an external source like Facebook or a blog.
• This is a site that can generate interest / business through book marking / email to a friend etc.
• Amount of text must be reduced drastically
• Make better use of the existing ‘consumer–in-the–picture’ images as users will identify with these. The site contains the right material but the image quality is rubbish.
• No misleading text! Content must instruct users not confuse them; and don’t say free downloads if they aren’t freely downloadable. Ditto video clips which took forever (or just didn’t) download.
