This is an interesting one – what do you get when a multi-million dollar company with over 15,000 stores worldwide gets an online presence? Well you get a shoddy, dated website of course!
Upon first entering the Starbucks website, you are presented with a rather rustic looking, coffee-coloured design (see what they’ve done there?). There’s some nice hand drawn imagery but, hang on, they’ve whacked the menu over half of it. If only I could just… pull… the image out…
But this isn’t a rant about the visual design of Starbucks because in honesty it’s not bad. Upon inspecting the source however, you see obtrusive JavaScript, inline CSS styling and use of tables for layout. Even the <title> tag for the homepage lies empty! No way would this mess pass any tests.
As a web designer struggling to get even medium sized clients, Starbucks would be a dream to put on my books. The design team behind this website cannot be forgiven, unless the site was built pre-millenium (which, I’ve not done my research on and it might well have been, but I doubt it).
Though, it’s not just the designers integrity I am questioning here. I navigated the website for a moment and at the bottom of the menu you see a link to “view international sites”. I gave it a click which presented a pop-up window (eugh) with a lovely 404 error inside of it. Why does this happen? Will somebody PLEASE tell me.
I use the analogy that if I nipped into a Starbucks for a quick coffee, sat down and read one of their company publications; NEVER would I expect to find a page listed in the magazine contents to actually be missing. One could argue that the magazine is proofed much further because it costs much more to produce and distribute. But this is absolutely not the point – your end user is still being left in the dark, whether a page is missing on your website or in your magazine.
Please leave your thoughts in the comments. I intend to do a few of these “shoot-em-down” posts about large company websites in the future, so do come back!
Kieren Evans
August 12, 2009
I completely agree. It’s not just the design that failed in my eyes, I once attempted to register one of their “Starbucks Cards” on their website and found it completely unintelligible to do so…
This might help understand why things are why they are:
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