No, Gwyneth! No!

Actually, yes….and then NO NO NO! 

I don’t know if you heard, but Gwyneth Paltrow launched a new website yesterday– Goop.com, which is supposed to be a "collection of experience that makes life good."   Sound promising, right?  She obviously has a good life, knows how to make things happen, and has good taste.  So– this site is something I would totally go to, in theory.

Only….oy vay!   Going there totally brought out my inner tech/ marketing geek.  Let me get this straight– the lucky people that got to partner with Gwyneth Paltrow, who has a built-in audience of millions of people and can get the press to do a release about a WEBSITE, chose to soft launch with an all-Flash site with NO NAVIGATION?  This is a joke, right?  Because, I’m going to tell you right now, if Gwyneth Paltrow is my client, and I get her to issue a press release about the brand-new site that she’s made, by God when millions of people go to it for the first time, THERE WILL BE A WAY TO GO BACK TO THE MAIN PAGE.  Oh, and also?  The whole thing won’t be under one frame, and the different (Flash-based) navigational elements will actually go their respective sections, instead of all leading to the same page of text that can’t be navigated away from, thus causing a nightmare of usability that even Jakob Nielsen would have to agree is a ROOKIE ERROR.   

I mean…..I just don’t…..come ON.  Website building 101 says that if you’re going to drive millions of people to a site, YOU SHOULD GIVE THEM SOMETHING TO DO WHEN THEY GET THERE.  Seriously?   They want us to sign up for a NEWSLETTER?   This makes me want to shreik with frustration when I think of all the hours probably spent in meetings, with one group arguing for the site to be totally fleshed out with good content and easily navigable sections, and the other one like "no– that’s ok!  Let’s just get the users, THEN we’ll fill in the blanks.  We have to strike while the iron is hot, man!  It’s Gwyneth Paltrow."  People sometimes fall into this trance-like state where they want their websites to be done faster, and it never (I mean 100% of the time NEVER) ends well.  Oh, and also?  I’d maybe make it so the site that actually launched on the day my celebrity endorser talked about it KEYWORD OPTIMIZED, like maybe I’d even put her name in the keywords, so that when people Google "Gwyneth Paltrow, website," they can actually find the site again.    Only it’s not, so you can’t, and instead the fans who run sites like gwyneth-paltrow.com and gwenthpaltrowfan.com are beating the pants off of GOOP, even though Gwyneth herself is involved.  For shame!  And, I’m not even going to buy the "it takes time to get organically ranked in the search engines, and we just launched this site" argument.  There is a way.  They just didn’t take it, dude.

So– really?  You’re going to launch a site with that much exposure in a Flash shell, with a title tag that reads "This is Goop."  REALLY?    And there’s going to be TWO box-looking things in the upper right hand corner, leading the user to think that there are two potential outcomes for clicking them, and then they’re both going to lead to the same place?  IS THAT SO?   

I’m sure you can see that this kind of thing really sticks in my craw, so to speak.  Granted, there is a chance that people are going to sign up for the newsletter just to see what Gwyneth Paltrow has to say about life, and that’s cool.  I’m just saying that whoever made the site could have (and should have) done it better, so that this press announcement could have led people to a site that was fully formed and would make them want to come back.   This makes me wish they had hired me to make the site, because there is NO WAY I would have used up an opportunity like "Gwyneth Paltrow talks about a website in the press" unless I was damn good and ready to convert as many of those potential users as possible into lifelong customers, you know what I’m saying?

Oh, did you know I do website usability and write and do marketing strategy and search engine optimization for websites?  Well, I do.  I may not know several things, but there is one thing I do know.  I could have done that site better.  Stay tuned next year for my book about this very subject, which will tell you NOT to do many of the things that the GOOP people did. 

And this concludes our tech moment of the day. 

• Category: Tech Moment