A Great Site, Perfectly Executed, and a Great Site, Very Badly Executed

Take a look at these two sites:

www.mofo.com

The new Morrison & Foerster site. Beautifully designed (I'm amazed a big law firm let something so beautiful, striking, modern and designed actually get built), well-written, organized, everything. And, since the design IS simple, the site loads instantly, which makes it a real treat to navigate.

www.arnell.com

This site, for Peter Arnell's ad agency, is even more beautiful than the MoFo site. Well-written, designed, and so on. But -- and this drives me nuts:

Because the site is grossly overdesigned, the video stream keeps freezing, which completely ruins the effect of the site.

Why do people keep doing this?

I'm using a Comcast broadband connection -- around 12 megabits per second. Reasonably fast.

The "Overview" section of the Arnell site, which is the home page, features a gorgeous video introduction to the firm. Arnell is a filmmaker, among other things, so the thing is terrific. But whoever built and/or set up the site, either failed Usability 101 or is just unconcerned with the people who actually will use it. I'm sure the video stream works flawlessly when it's running off a server inside the firm's offices. But when it's viewed out here in the real world, it pauses. It freezes. All the careful, beautiful edits are completely beside the point. It hung three times in the first ninety seconds.

And then I clicked away from it.

Comments

[Thorne]

Peter:

You've got to be kidding!

The new MoFo site is set entirely in Arial, much of it bold, knock-out type, as on the About Us page (http://www.mofo.com/about/).

Not only is this downright ugly and hard to read, it's way unprofessional. (As is the use of French spacing.)

It's a design disaster, especially since the old MoFo site looked much, much better.

The Arnell site is like the sites of so many agencies, but there's nothing wrong with the streaming video. It runs just fine. (Try it again.)

How can a site be "grossly over-designed" such that "the video stream keeps freezing?"

There are lots of things that can cause video streaming problems, but a site's design is certainly not one of them.

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[Thorne]

Peter --

Where are you?

What's up?

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cause video streaming problems, but a site's design is certainly not one of them.