sugarenia.com

Some people working in advertising are funny.

They call web designers know-it-alls just because at some point, the latter refuse their marketing ideas of placing banners everywhere around the page, saying “Hey, that’s not cool”.

There’s an equivalent story.

A man punches his wife in a street. Another man passes by and says “Hey, that’s not cool”. The wife-beater replies with all the finesse of a 5-year-old “Go away, know-it-all!”.*

“Nyah nyah nyah nyah nyah omitted for obvious reasons.

I hate to point out flaws. Seriously. I get disappointed when I do so because my New Year’s resolution was to be as positive as possible this year. Plus, I’m no perfect myself.

Alas.

So I will speak with facts for this one. No sarcasm, no bitterness, because I respect people’s work. I’ll leave the conclusion to you.

I’m firing up GMail to see that I got followed by the greek department of Tribal DDB, @TribalDDBAthens. Hey, nice! Tribal decided to go social. Since I love hearing about new campaigns and advertising website launches, I follow back. Curious, I click on the link given in their Twitter profile.

Gonk. First hit. Website doesn’t work without the www prefix – as expected by naïve me, even if mr. @hakmem disagrees. It’s just a small thing though, someone mistyped the link while creating the profile, so I go on typing the www, eager to see the site.

Website welcomes me. Well thank you! Quite minimal though. Searching for a menu or something that looks navigational. Woot, a button! It’s in greek and labeled “Client area”. I’m not a client, zilch. Paying more attention to the copy, I realise that it asks me to visit the international Tribal DDB website and select “Athens” from its menu. Whut? I’m a bit unhappy about that. However, I’m determined to find more about their work so I click anyway.

Link doesn’t open in a new page, that’s good. Yay, the site looks similar, I like consistency. Searching for the “Athens” link the greek website told me about. Nowhere to be seen and still, nothing too navigational there, only a bunch of gold copy that’s about awards and not linkable. It’s nice that they’re so successful, but I don’t really care about awards. I’m itching to see work samples. Where are they?

After some seconds, I realise that there’s an enter site link on the left. Sighing on that (and on the “This site is designed for 1024×768″ text on bottom), I click on it.

Damn! A new window. Bleh. It seems that they’re using Flash for their site, but I’m prepared for that, many advertising agencies do. Grinding a bit my teeth I click on the ClickToFlash banner and wait for the loader to finish, thinking the actual website is about to launch. Wrong. That’s an intro.

See that “Skip intro” link up there? Yup, me neither. It’s so pale over the white background it’s painful to look at. And I can’t click on the actual intro to go on. I decide to wait it out and after some (precious) seconds, voila! The actual website.

Now, that “Athens” link. Playing a bit with my mouse over the ever-revolving city list on the left I find it. Wait, what’s “Health” doing between Hamburg and Helsinki? Is there a city named “Health”? Never mind. I click on Athens.

Things are loading. That ever-revolving city-something list on the left is still moving – why? I’ve already selected a city. It’s starting to become too annoying but I’m blocking it out. My aim: work samples. Their menu: that.

I only have 1.5 or 2 degrees of myopia and I still have difficulty reading those menu options. Nevertheless, I click on Work. Meanwhile, the box that’s directly on the left of the menu keeps rotating empty blue cells. I wonder why for a brief moment but then I just click.

Yippie! The interface got larger, at last! Will see some screenshots. I see another revolving carousel and some lonesome logos. Naturally, I click on the carousel, on a thumbnail that tickled my fancy.

The text isn’t selectable but that’s alright. There’re some screenshots for me to check out, but they’re scaled down. I try clicking on them to see if there’s a bigger preview available, nope. I click through the available screenshots but I can’t see a thing. I click on the “view the site” link to see it in all of its glory. Yay! It works. Hmmm….

OK, back to the site. That’s a case study, so there’re three tab things with more info. I see the idea. I click on “Service” but I don’t find anything interesting. On clicking “Result” though, I get some interesting stuff…

“Undefined” alright.

So I leave this to you, dear readers: what do you think? Should I feel satisfied by this web experience? Did I achieve my aim? Did I learn something about this company?

I did. A lot more than you can imagine.

No amount of social media presence can fix a broken web image. Sure, you have a strong brand, a successful company, many happy customers. But seriously, this? I expected better, Tribal DDB.

So. The iPad. Cool, eh?

What, you don’t like it? Think Jobs under-delivered in his keynote? Thinking your tiny Dell netbook can do all that and more, even if you have to crouch to look at the screen and glue your hands together to type?

Yeah, I know. Tablets with full 9.7 inches of ultra-sensitive touch screens are so common nowadays. I mean, these things can even play HD video without crashing their way to reboot, yeah, that’s common too. And the interface? Pssssh, I’ve seen Excel worksheets looking better than that iCal view. And all that starting from $499? Gee, what were these guys thinking.

Seriously, people, get a grip. I don’t know what kind of mystic arcana you believed Jobs would unveil in his keynote, but really, are you that close-minded to think that the iPad is common and overrated? Have you seen many tablet PCs nowadays that look and function as cool and intuitively as the iPad looked in that intro video?

And don’t get me started about the lack of Flash support; seriously, who cares¹. Oh I know – Flash developers care. Look, my fellow developers, I admire your skills but seriously, seriously, don’t you ever think that maybe it’s the time to expand your skills a bit if you want to hop on the bandwagon?

Most developer complaints I’ve heard are based on the loose axis of “yeah I know I could do that and more with Cocoa, but I’m confident with my current set of skills and I don’t want to learn Objective-C”. This is wrong and you know it – this is as if PHP developers absolutely refused to dabble on Ruby & Python because they’re “happy with their current set of skills”. We’re called developers for God’s sake, don’t you think we should develop our skills every now and then?

The iPad is not made for you and me, fellow geek. It’s primarily targeted to people that are still afraid of interacting with PCs, those that don’t have a clue about drivers and web apps and Wi-Fi setup. And this is exactly the kind of people that won’t buy a Linux netbook, dear Open Source zealots – because as much as Ubuntu has made Linux user-friendly, there’s still much filling that shows between the seams.

One could argue that I’m a total iPad fangirl and everything above is the fruit of my utter fangirlism, but I assure you, I’m not that much of a fanatic cookie. I’ll probably don’t even buy the first generation iPad. But I’ve seen people getting it so wrong on the interwebs these days that I’ve collected a massive amount of ranting fume.

¹ Yeah, I know Farmville fanatics, you’ll have to stick to your netbooks to sow your corn, but I don’t really care about you to be frank.