Gravis Shoes – they rock. Unfortunately the same thing can’t be said for the web site. I guess what happened is that a designer without much knowledge of designing for the web had been in charge of the site. This morning when I tried accessing the site it took AGES to load (this is over a 56k connection). The whole site is done in flash, which is not necessarily a bad thing (although I’m not a huge fan of Flash). Many (although not all) of the features on the site could have been achieved without the use of Flash. I’m sure we’ve all used Flash sites that may initially take a little while to load, but once loaded presents a catalogue which is then usable without a long delay between pages. I think that this constitutes reasonable performance.
The worst thing about the site that there is not always a ‘loading’ graphic. The upshot was that at first I thought that site was dead and wasn’t rendering pages. I tried again and figured out that the page was still loading. It must have taken about seven minutes to view the page for one shoe! That page consisted of a fancy menu and a picture of a shoe. That was it. When I clicked the ‘details’ link I again waited for nearly five minutes. I gave up in the end as I couldn’t be arsed waiting. It was the same story with the ‘dealers’ link. It would be easily solved with a link to a non-flash version of the site.
When I tried again later it loaded a lot faster, still a couple of minutes for each page to come up but this time a loading indicator appeared nearly as soon as the link to the page was clicked. Hmmm. I will forgive them but I still think that there should be a non-flash site.