12 Spokes

After reading about how The Gap took a bit of time to do a site revamp, I took a look for myself and was a little shocked at their idea of a redesign. Just like many other mediums, you’ve gotta love the paradox in the Web world that a handful of people (or even just one) can make a beautiful, accessible site but a huge company with a lot of money and influence (enough to pay Common to be in their commercials) can’t top it.

Here are some things I would have asked before I gave the green light to launch this site:

1) Why on earth is the page optimized for a 800px wide browsing area, but there’s 33% dead air on the right? (read: horizontal scrollbar at bottom of screen)

2) Why does my Sale Image look like a Photoshop 101 experiment that could be done some quick color and contrast manipulation? (Does anyone else see that thin brownish bar at the very bottom?)

3) Why did we pick this font?

4) Kudos to for the use of Flash. I’m a huge fan of small Flash widgets for logos (a la KEXP), but this logo seems uninspiring (and diminutive?).

5) What is that white space below the top navigation? Nothing ever shows up there.

6) More kudos to The Gap for their innovative AJAXish shopping experience (multiple products on the side of a product), but it seems way too complicated (especially considering the rest of the site looks simplified). One request for me on a product page (“The Rugged Romantic”) required 171 requests, 702 kb, and almost 15 seconds to load (this is on a Powerbook G4 on an okay wireless network).

7) The icons! What happened to the icons? Did they take a vacation to Zaxxon and never come back?

8) What’s up with the favicon being a solid black box?

9) What’s up with the inline styles?

10) Why doesn’t my site validate?

Disclaimer: this is partly just an exercise in site deconstruction, given that I might be liable to make the same mistakes.

In conclusion, the site works (and has some functionality of its contemporary “Web 2.0” sites), but it looks like a generic ecommerce site with not much to set it apart. With that said, most people just go there to shop, so I digress.