River Island learns the hard way!

In March 2006 River Island launched an all-Flash e-commerce website to great fanfare. The launch was reported throughout the marketing media and trumpeted as a technological break-through. The agency responsible for creating the site quoted

"Our design for the River Island website demonstrates the full potential of Flash technology. When used well, Flash is a fantastic platform for developing clean, efficient and intuitive websites. It allows you to create a really simple, easy-to-use site and there's no jumping around from page to page, which seems to hinder so many e-commerce sites. This website raises the bar for fashion retailer's."

Unfortunately, the site turned out to be completely inaccessible (see our legal partners Out-law) and pretty much invisible to search engines! The furore that followed all quarters of the press, pressure groups, web experts and individuals was immediate. River Island was forced to issue a public apology and promised to address the issues immediately.

Fast forward 12 months (almost) and below is an image of the site as it stands now.

 

Whilst I have a degree of sympathy for the River Island marketing team that commissioned the site (Their agency should have known better) the continuation of this problem into 2007  is simply unforgivable and simply serves to make a bad situation worse.