Hello? Navigation? Where are You?

UPDATE:  They fixed it.  Not too sure what the deal is with the fix.  I mean, a fix would involve not sim­ply for­ward­ing to MySpace…  Any­way, even this is bet­ter than the old stuff.

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Flash web­sites (and I’m talk­ing about Flash only here) piss me off. There seems to be this rule with flash design­ers: Make it as hard as pos­si­ble to nav­i­gate my ultra-cool super slick Flash site. Look, Flash gurus. If you hate your poten­tial users enough to make your site so frus­trat­ing as to incite mass sui­cide, why bother design­ing sites at all? Why not open a gift shop at the entrance to hell? It would at least be an hon­est living.

Hey look… They fixed it…

This site is among the worst ever in this cat­e­gory. The site is for what I can only assume is a band called “the like” (why the hell they chose that name, I’ll never know). The music (if you can find it in the site at all) isn’t bad, depend­ing on your taste. If you like coun­try, metal, rap, clas­si­cal or any­thing but alter­na­tive pop style stuff, you’ll hate it. Wait. I’m not a music critic. I’ll move on.

The site is so dif­fi­cult to nav­i­gate that you’ll need a PhD in suck nav­i­ga­tion just to fig­ure it out. First you have to con­tend with the oblig­a­tory Flash intro (I would have used the term “ubiq­ui­tous” but that word is just played out), which is kind of creepy by itself. If you fig­ure out that you should click some­thing, you get to this weird “Chron­i­cles of Nar­nia” style bed­room with sketchy peo­ple on the floor. Now what?

By nature I just started mov­ing the mouse around. When a word appeared I attempted to click it. Nope, that didn’t work. Play­ing around a bit I real­ized that the click­ing was to be on the object that spawned the word, not the word itself. OK, why? Why wouldn’t you just make the word part of the click­able ele­ment? Because stu­pid Flash guys hate us, that’s why.

This is the ulti­mate bad nav­i­ga­tion site as far as I’m con­cerned. I tried click­ing on the store, which took me into the closet (a place I’m not overly com­fort­able with occu­py­ing). I had options at this point. I could click Inter­na­tional (the first one I saw, BTW) or United States. Too bad “United States” is a bro­ken link, because I hap­pen to live there.

I’ve asked before if the folks who put these things together think they nailed it. I’m pretty sure that the goal of Flash site mak­ers is to frus­trate and con­fuse, so… SUCCESS! I’m done with this site, as I can’t take the band seri­ously any more, and that’s despite the fact that the girls in the band are fairly attrac­tive in a waify, Kate Moss, sort of way. I even tried in vain to read their bio’s, but the pages kept com­ing up missing.

I gen­uinely hope they hire a new designer, because the guy they got to do this site should con­sider doing that gift shop thing instead.

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