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Feb
13
Website Hide & Go Seek with FORM by Jerry Tam
Filed Under SEO
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Information is so readily available that it is incredibly frustrating when I can’t find something I am looking for online. That doesn’t happen too frequently, but last night was a great example. I was watching an episode of Bravo’s Make Me A Supermodel (MMAS going forward) in which the model-wannabes had to walk for a designer at New York Fashion Week. 
I fell in love with the dress shown here and wanted to know where I could get it. I knew the designers name (FORM), that they were based in New York and that they had been featured on the show. That should be enough to find their website right? Wrong.
I searched numerous combinations of FORM, clothing line, New York, Make Me A Supermodel, clothes and designer to no avail. I did find many blogs mentioning the label being on the show, but none of them linked to the FORM website. Probably because they couldn’t find it either. So I dug through the MMAS website and found that the full name of the label is FORM by Terry Jam, but still no link to their website. First and foremost they should have negotiated a link from Bravo to their site. How many people do you think went to Bravo’s site after they watched the show so they could check out FORM’s clothes and dead ended there?
Searching for “Form by Terry Jam” got me to their websites, jerrytam.com and formnewyork.com. Unfortunately the websites are basically useless on many levels. First, from an optimization standpoint, the sites blew my mind…or just blew. Just about everything they could possibly make an image, they did. Even the bio text is an image. Most of their page titles consist of one word such as “information” or even worse their abbreviations for the collections such as “FWO8INTRO”. FORM is apparently affiliated with scatolaus.com, an entirely Flash site. Maybe they got advice from Scatolaus on how to develop websites so exclusive no one can find them, like LA bars in Swingers.
I could go on for days about all the things wrong with the site from an optimization angle but you get my point. The sites also couldn’t be harder for a consumer to navigate if blind monkeys developed them. In order to find the dress I apparently have to know what collection it’s in. I understand the designer’s need and want to have the collections viewable as a whole. But for usability sake, it would also make sense to tag each item by type (dress, pants, scarf) and color so people find the style of items they are interested in through a simple search. Maybe this will happen when they launch their online store this month (doubtful) “with newest online e commerce site“.
Obviously I found the dress on the site, so why am I still so annoyed (other than the fact I couldn’t buy it)? Because FORM probably paid good money to have those sites made. And they probably have no idea their sites blow or that they are missing out on potential customers. Now, while I believe that anyone that is purchasing a website for their business should do their due diligence and research what they are buying, I also believe that creating a website as carelessly as these ones were is negligent. I’m not saying you have to optimize a site for a client that isn’t paying for it, but you shouldn’t build a site that is just a painting hung in a dark hall of the internet. If even for your own pride and reputation, you should create sites that have a baseline standard for quality and usability (as I have said before). Creating a site that does nothing for your client won’t likely get them to return when it’s time to upgrade. However, if the site you create gives them a taste of what they could get, they may come begging for more.
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Yep, I was looking at your blog and I read this blog related to “Make me a Super Model”. I did. I read it. This can not be good for my image.
dk