Spring is a time of rebirth and renewal, and in that spirit two large Canadian sites have unveiled significant redesigns. “CBC.ca”:http://www.cbc.ca/ and “Sears.ca”:http://www.sears.ca/ have taken the wraps off major site overhauls.
h2. CBC.ca
CBC’s former site had been getting a little long in the tooth. It was a very utilitarian design with pages that essentially contained a laundry list of links to articles. That and the odd picture thrown in for some visual context. But mainly it was a fairly dry information delivery system.
The new site is a major improvement. Its grid system is far better laid out to allow readers to scan the page. The visual design has been updated to better reflect modern Web design. The navigation has been simplified into two choices Radio or TV, (actually three if you count CBC.ca as a nav item). This is an improvement from the previous navigation which was much more confusing.
One criticism, I’ve heard of the site, is that it borrows from “CNN.com.”:http://www.cnn.com/ I don’t see this being a big issue. CNN and CBC are large news gathering organizations and would end up with similar design problems. Coming to a similar design solution would seem natural.
Left hand navigation is better laid out, providing access to features like Podcasts and RSS feeds which were previously difficult to find or not available.
The CBC group does really great work in a challenging environment. The CBC is a tough place to gain consensus due to the number of people who have input. The mere fact this redesign looks as good as it does is a testament to the talented people there.
h2. Sears.ca
I need to disclose up front that I was not familiar with the previous Sears.ca site so I can only look at this one as a fresh site.
Sears.ca is trying to bring its site up to modern e-commerce standards. In fact “they partnered with Amazon”:http://www.onedegree.ca/2005/04/28/filtered-links-for-april-28-2005 to get this site online. The visual appeal has that candy style that is oh so 2.0. The main nav has a glow effect running horizontally through it. The navigational text is white on a white glow. This lowers the contrast making it potentially tough to read.
Month: June 2006
So you’ve finally come up with a killer domain name for your new Web 2.0 venture. You’ve registered walrussite.ca for a year and now it’s time to book the caterers for the launch party.
Hang on a minute – you’re not quite done yet! In fact, you should seriously consider registering 10-20 additional domain names right now. That’s because you need to protect yourself from The Seven Deadly Domain Name Variations:
As Internet marketers we live either in the now or slightly in the future (ever ask your neighbour about feeds, podcasts or YouTube?). With that in mind I thought it might be nice to look at the progress on online retailer – “Harry Rosen”:http://www.harryrosen.com/ has made in e-mailing their customer list.
Here we see an e-mail sent from my wonderfully named salesperson Barby Ginsberg back in September 2002:
_(click the image to see a larger version)_
Besides being text only and using non-trackable links, the message has a lot of quirks that caused me to use it as an example of _what not to do_ when teaching e-marketing courses.