So Ireland.com, the lavish new website purchased and
developed by Tourism Ireland to promote the country during the 12 months of The
Gathering and beyond, went live this week.
Not that there was much fanfare. Instead, there was a
slackjawed reaction on Twitter and, presumably, further afield as early
visitors struggled manfully to find their way around.
The load
time
Part of the price I pay for living in rural Meath is that I find myself outside
of the reach of those super-fast broadband systems. (My house is just four
miles outside Navan, around 40 minutes from Dublin in off-peak traffic, so
hardly remote – although when it comes to communications infrastructure I may
as well be living on the side of Carrauntwohill.)
So my net connection isn’t
top-of-the-range, but this is the only website I’ve visited recently which
heaved towards a full page-load. It took three refreshes on Chrome to get all
the way there. The first two presented with me with a black page. It was akin
to the deep inside of a cave, which in many ways was more navigable than the labyrinth
which greeted us when the site finally loaded.
The
pop-up
I remarked earlier this week on the
strange return of the pop-up, and this is another example. Pop-ups these
days are generally layered within the browser rather than a second browser
window, but they’re not a whole lot pile less annoying for all that. This one
is doubly so, as the first message every user is presented with could be
paraphrased as: Are ya sure you’re in the right place?
The pop-up suggests that you might just be better off scooting along to DiscoverIreland.com (the site this one is purported to replace) or DiscoverNorthernIreland.com (the new Ireland.com is co-funded by the tourist authorities on either side of the border).
From the alternative options to the opening salvo of “If you’re a visitor from
the island of Ireland...”, it’s allmighty confusing, liable to leave most
visitors scratching their heads in squinting confusion before they’ve even
properly landed on the homepage. Usually, you have to try to be this bad.
The
homepage
If you were to be really kind, you might say it’s, er, innovative. If you were
to be really humane, you’d say euthanize the poor bastard and put it out of its
misery, and us out of ours. The entire homepage flies in the face of all web
convention. The navigation system is all over the place (literally). Innovation
is good, but this is like reinventing the wheel as a triangle.
The
background images
Yes, that photo of Glassilaun Beach in Connemara, taken by Gareth McCormack, is
lovely. Of course it is. What it isn’t, and should never be, is a background of
a web page. Images as background pieces came to an end with the fall from grace
of Geocities, and for 15 years or so it was good riddance.
There are lots of
attractive background images scattered throughout the site. They’d be perfect,
really perfect, fenced off in a nicely designed photo gallery, but behind all
the menus and messaging they prove resolutely counterproductive, delaying
page-load past all acceptable thresholds and possibly culminating in unfortunate
subliminal connections between Ireland’s beauty spots and teeth-grinding
annoyance.
The menus
Maybe the joke’s on us. Maybe this is all just about the famously circuitous
route us Irish take through our daily wander down the boreens and byroads.
Maybe it takes its inspiration from the one about the tourist who asks for
directions to Bally-wherever and is told, “Well I wouldn’t start from here”.
The menus on Ireland.com are to intuitive what sharks are to cuddly. If you
were explaining the menu system to someone who hasn’t seen it, it goes
something like this:
- There is a menu on the left and there’s a menu on the right.
- The items on the left are Flights & Ferries, Help, Map and Share, each with their own little icon. (It’s a blessing that Help is elevated to such a central position, because there’s a good chance they’ll be getting plenty of traffic there.)
- The Flights and Ferries button is twice as big as its three menu comrades, although that appears to be deliberate – it certainly contributes to the bumpy, incomplete-jigsaw feel of the whole.
- Over on the right you have the hierarchical menus, or what seems to pass for breadcrumbs on Ireland.com. When you’re in Pubs and Bars, for instance, we’re presented with a subset of menus enlighteningly entitled “Places to do this”, (from page to page, do what exactly is never really clear) “See full listing” and “Find Offers”.
- Below this again, although spookily floating apart (I experienced my first ever bout of internet seasickness on Ireland.com), sits the wonderfully inclusive “Everything in Ireland” link. Well if that isn’t ambitious, I don’t know what is.
- Moving up to the top bar of the page there are three other baffling sets of top-down menus.
- On the left, the aforementioned “Everything in Ireland” lists places to go, things to do, event, places to stay and the increasingly and ominously ubiquitous “offers”. In common with virtually every link on Ireland.com, there’s an element of surprise behind all of these, all of which tends to make the site one big box of faintly threatening tricks.
(Over Christmas I sat down with my three-year-old to watch Willy Wonka and the Chocolate Factory, and Ireland.com brought an exchange from that movie to mind:
- ‘What kind of place is this, Wonka, some sort of funhouse?’
- ‘Why, having fun?’)
- In the middle there is an Accommodation listings and filtering service, which is really about as clear as it gets on Ireland.com. It sort of works, surprisingly, if you do things in the order they want you to. I was so radical as to click on a star rating before selecting an Accommodation Type. I damn near broke the internet.
- On the right there’s a “Travelling to Ireland” menu set, which treads the tried and tested Rough Guide series of headings – about Ireland, getting here, once you’re here, essentials, etc. If a user is lucky, an item they click will load a relevant page before hell freezes over. And if not, then you have the consolation of watching a nice animated shamrock do its thing over and over again as the ice closes in.
- I never did get to find out what’s behind any of these “Travelling to Ireland” pages. Maybe they’re all delectable, but I wouldn’t know. I could only wait so long.
That
Tourism Ireland logo as hour-glass
Somebody, somewhere, in some meeting, at some point over the past 18 months,
came up with the following brainwave: Let’s treat visitors to an animated
Tourism Ireland shamrock logo graphic while each page is loading? Again, as with
the background images, this effectively draws a direct line between a famous
Irish symbol and the worst sort of face-scraping irritation.
Overlapping
pages
Why? Why? Why? What is wrong with clicking on a link and being brought to a
separate page that corresponds with that link? Instead, there's the discombobulating feeling associated with layer upon layer of crap. Routinely on Ireland.com, a click sets in
motion all sorts of disconcerting movement and shuffling before the music stops
and all the in-page elements rush headlong to find a vacant seat, leaving menus
and other incidental items sheepishly hanging around the edges of the
dancefloor trying not to be noticed.
The errors
In the half hour I spent on my virtual wander around Ireland.com, I hit
several of these.
It’s not surprising, really, that a site as unnecessarily
complex as this should have so many bugs like code errors and menus appearing twice (although Irish pubs and seeing double might be construed by some as a fitting pair). Errors like this are usually weeded out in the
testing stage, so it appears that there may have been little or no testing
stage for Ireland.com.
The
search box
It gets bizarrer and bizarrer. Search for a random location or phrase and
instead of being treated to something relevant you’re often confronted with a
match that bears a relationship to your original search phrase that’s
superficial, at best.
As Dermot Casey has pointed out over on 10thmonth.net, two of the top five results for a search for "Dublin" yielded results about Carlow, while the music venues section was even more laughable:
Interested in coming to Ireland for music. It appears that Portaferry Hotel Cookery school is one of our top music venues.
And to think that it all cost in
the region of €3m, including €500,000 to acquire the domain name from The Irish Times, with most of the rest going to an agency in the UK.
Tell me, are there any redeeming
features?
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