River Island sells v-neck jumpers online but Google will never know it (updated 5th March)
By: Jonathan Briggs
March 1, 2006
New Media Age reported in this week's magazine that ecommerce company Bumblebee had developed a new completely Flash ecommerce site for fashion retailer River Island - watch out because the site takes over your screen.
It is graphically appealing and the shopping process is slick and fast but both the client and the developers seem to have misunderstood a number of issues about the web: the site is not accessible and as far as we can tell all but invisible to the search engines.
Accessibility is not just a nice to have. It is a legal requirement that sites comply with the Disabilities Discrimination Act 1995; this was extended to online in October 2004. There has been lots of publicity for this change in web design trade magazines such as New Media Age and it is inconceivable that Bumblebee missed it. Of course perhaps River Island insisted, but we are doing a disservice to our industry if we fail to persuade our clients to do the right thing. At the very least there should be an accessible version of the site.
Hiding your site from the partially sighted is one thing, hiding it from the search engines is another. How many clients looking for a smart v-neck jumper would type the phrase into Google rather than go to River Island (which they might not even remember)?
By designing River Island the way they have, Bumblebee have made sure that v-neck jumpers will not be related to the River Island site at all. Lots of opportunities for Pay-per-click advertising of course but why don't web designers understand the way web users actually use the web?
Update - 4th March (3 days later)
We are often asked to prove that we understand how search engines work and that we can make a difference.
Since this article was written we have certainly moved up the ranks for v-neck jumpers on Google; at the time of writing we are number 2 behind Monsoon. River Island, not surprisingly is not in the top 100 results.
We are number one for "River Island jumpers" but that is easier than the generic term that customers might be searching.
This demonstrates the power of keyword rich content rather than any special tricks. Of course we probably won't maintain our position for these keywords and we don't particularly want to, but the point is made.
If River Island or any other ecommerce brand wants to capture customers looking for the things they sell, they had better talk to an ecommerce company that understands the web rather than a marketing company that only wants to entertain the narrow audience around the brand.