Sep
25
2006Gucci.com - Flash without Flash
25
2006
Luxury brands are usually the last folks to care about web standards - a great many are 100% Flash-based, but the new Gucci.com, recently relaunched by Wolzelle, proves that, these days, the “luxury brand” aesthetic and web standards are no longer mutually exclusive.
Gucci.com certainly feels like a typical luxury brand web site, with big sliding panes of fancy photography, multi-layered graphics fading in and out, and ultra-minimalist layout. But the amazing thing is that it was done with no Flash - or other browser plugins - whatsoever. The magic was done entirely with Script.aculo.us, the web-standards based JavaScript UI library/system/API/what-have-you. And it looks gorgeous.
Kudos to Gucci for seeing the value in web standards, and kudos to Wolzelle for pulling this off.
Not bad at all… but they still insist on resizing my browser, grrrr!
David Kaspar 10/12/06 @ 1:02 pmThis is technically outstanding work.
At the same time, it is one of the worst development implementations I have ever seen on the web, and by far one of the web dev cases to be considered as an example to avoid at all costs.
1) I click on the prefered country, and I wait for some seconds. I already have 912Kb (!!!) of data in my browser cache. This is not acceptable, and a real wtf. I wouldn’t care if this site had real-time 3D flying purses and models, it would still be not acceptable for the homepage of such a major company.
2) Please give me a search engine (google included) which will be able to crawl this site for information. Given the extreme usage of AJAX, this data will not be available to any crawler. I want to find the “purses” section of this site through google. I can’t. Google just point to 2 expired URLs. This site does not even contain some meta tags for crying out loud!
3) The site’s developers are at the hospital right now, still recovering from the (extremely difficult to implement) mess they have created. It must have taken a whole lot of time to create this ineffective masterpiece, and it must have cost the creating company a LOT of money.
4) What the hell is the idea of the horizontal scroll bar with AJAX loaded photos, whose thumbnails are on the FAR RIGHT OF THE SCREEN? Whose book “usability” and “interface design” sections refer to this scenario?
5) This site will play as it is supposed to be on the extreme minority of browsers.
You are talking about this site NOT using Flash as if it is a good thing! Give me a break, please…
1) It would be operating a lot % smoother and faster.
2) It would be playing on 96% of the browsers of the whole world (the ones that have the flash plugin installed, that is…)
3) The download sizes would be a lot smaller. Believe me, I know.
4) The development in Flash would be through in a fraction of time compared to this.
Again, it is NOT a personal experiments / fooling around with Javascript site. It is Gucci.com. And it looks as if the javascript gurus who created it did it just for themselves.
It reminds me when Flash first appeared. People thought back in 1998 that having 50pt Arial fonts rotating around themselved in a browser was a good thing. Now the same begins to happen with AJAX. Until it pops as a bubble, of course.
To conclude, this site as a whole belongs to thedailywtf.com.
ToyMaker 11/23/06 @ 2:36 pm