Update Your Website - McDonalds (Part 1)
Sometimes you come across a website so bad that it takes more than one shot to get out all you want to say. Such is the case with McDonalds. McDonalds is a huge company which has come through a recent storm of criticism quite well. While it is often the easy target for people with a nutritional or anti-globalisation agenda, it never really is the scourge people say it is. There are far worse people on the planet than people who sell you a cheap burger.
However their are few corporate websites that are worse than McDonalds. I was intending to detail a local, corporate site but the initial global corporate page is so bad, I thought it deserved special attention
The first thing you notice on this website is just how blurry it is. I actually thought it was my vision that had gone for a split second. The “I’m going to McDonalds” image is very unprofessional for the opening salvo of a global corporate megasite. What follows beneath is not worthy of a Flash developer with 1 day’s experience. The Images are blurred, poor quality and irrelevant (A scuba diver??). The headers which really should be text are too thick, blurred and ensconced in drop shadow to be illegible.
You might also notice the awful crossover gap between corporate McDonalds and McDonalds USA where the beloved scuba diver is cut in two. This is not the result of my freeze framing a flash movie quickly, the image actually hangs there while you mouse over the completely unintuitive navigation of the header text above. Try it out and see if feels natural.
While I appreciate the difficulty in managing multi-site corporate websites, they should never fall apart on the front page like McDonalds’s website has. This is a very wealthy firm and should be spending more than $50 on their homepage. Which is my estimate of the spend on this page.
Posted 25.10.07