30/08/06

Waterstones.com

Waterstones has soft-launched its new, revised, and much-touted-as-the-saviour-of-the-beleagured-retailer website, which now is visible at www.waterstones.com

First of all, I’m impressed that they’ve got it done on time, seeing as this was announced back in May in the outcome of the W/Ottakers news cycle.

The website was done by code who also do parent company HMV.

Here’s some immediate thoughts.

I quite like the overall look and feel. It’s much better than Amazon, clearer and pretty consistent. Good job.

It’s wider than would be visible on a 600×800 screen. Sure, lots of people design for 1024×768 (a bigger screen resolution, basically) but that’s not necessarily a good thing. We’ve yet to move to 1024×768, although I’ve been tempted. (As a guide, around 8% of visitors here use 800×600 or smaller).

The site doesn’t validate. This is very bad and should be addressed as an immediate concern. There’s no excuse for not doing this and it will also have a negative effect on their site indexing and search engine rankings.

I don’t find the navigation particularly intuitive. The left hand stuff is OK (although looking for Design books meant going through art & photography which was fine but not exactly immediately obvious) but the top stuff doesn’t appeal to me at all. The free postage banner is a little lost, and I can’t see anything about the videos discussed in the media

I’m not sure that they have database issues, but there are some concerns on some basic searches. Life of Pi; see Wayne Rooney where the hbk is cheaper than the pbk (although this cold be the insane economics of the high street).

The ‘added value’ is scant. First of all, it’s AJAX, which means blocking out google and other accessibility concerns. But, the ‘inside the book’ stuff really sucks. In all the examples I saw, we’re talking about a low-res scan of the front and back jacket, and a very, very, poor scan of the first page only - which is illegible
[Link to The Long Tail]. I looked at a number of titles and all had the same problems.

I like the fact they’re doing this, and the fact that it’s on the same page as the book is a vast improvement on the HarperCollins implementation I blogged about before - but their content is dire. If Waterstones is going to seriously compete with Amazon - and that is the goal here - then they need to up their game considerably on the new front, content.

It’s fast, which is good.

So, we like, with some caveats, but they have got a long, long, long way to go. Best of luck to them on all fronts.

Posted by Peter Collingridge in Design, Publishing.