New Vodafone Website Design Review
Now that Vodafone have relaunched their Irish website I thought I’d give my 2 cents on the matter.
First of all it’s a definite improvement. I like the use of colour, they use a lot of colour but it’s not over the top. It definitely makes them stand out from their competitors. However it is not there yet. The primary visual real estate is taken up by an ad for a Motorola phone. It is far too big and likely to be irrelevant to 95% of customers. The users of the site, those with MyVodafone accounts have been demoted further down the page but at least they are still above the fold.
The only major bug I found was in the MyVodafone section. After logging in there is a dynamic ad located to the right of the screen. This ad is both poorly designed and needlessly distracting and abrasive. Vodafone should have got beyond such ads back in 1999.
The worst part of this ad is that it has been incorrectly coded. As a result if one scrolls down the page, the focus goes back up to the top automatically, so Vodafone are using some javascript similar to those “alwasy on top” floating menus. Very Annoying and not very professional.
In summary a good job by the designers, bar the adverts and a poor job by the coders for leaving a bug like that slip through. It is a pity that what stops this from being an excellent design is 2 different advertisements of the same phone. They must have a lot of Motorolas to sell!
Bug Update When you enter a number into recipient text box, the cursor focus jumps back up to the message textbox. You have to try sending it with a blank recipient first, it works the second time.
Posted 11.10.07
February 17th, 2008 at 4:34 pm
Brian I dont see the page above. My homepage is quite different from yours?
http://vodafone.ie
February 17th, 2008 at 6:48 pm
Hi Richard,
Certainly looks like the new version of the homepage has the colour toned down compared to the October 2007 design above.
Personally I prefer the version in the screenshot above - It looks less busy and nice colour coding.
As I look at the homepage now I have about 5 layout bugs, but this is probably because I’m using Firefox 3.