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Please help Investec from committing Online suicide

Justin Hartman

• 2 min read

Investec Bank, a company I’ve long admired, is about to ruin their hard earned reputation online. On the Investec homepage there is a graphic enticing users to test drive their new website located at http://beta.investec.com. This is what it looks like.

Investec Bank's new beta site

I doubt that it’s just me but the new Investec site is simply unusable and I’m struggling to see how their clients are going to be happy with the new interface. While the site is certainly pushing boundaries in terms of web design I have to ask one simple question. Why?

Let me explain why I think this site is bad for them:

  • The site is largely built using JavaScript. This is bad news for Search Engines and if you happen to have JavaScript disabled in your browser (many browsers do) then the site simply doesn’t load.
  • All content is loaded in an iframe. Once again, bad news for Search Engines as their content is never going to be indexed correctly. This leaves a major gap for Investec competitors who’s sites are optimised for SEO.
  • Font size of the content is so small that their major base of clients over the age of 45 are really going to have a tough time reading it.
  • Navigation is extremely unintuitive. At first glance it looks like the site is still loading because you don’t see any navigation bars. Eventually you figure out that if you hover on the smaller buttons to the left and right the real navigation bars appear. Using the 7 second rule new visitors to this site will simply close the browser window and move onto the next site.
  • The market indicators appear to be hidden in the bottom bar. We figured out that you actually need to click the indicators to have them pop up. There is no message or call to action informing people that they should click this bar to read more.

Investec have a one question survey about their new beta site and I urge anyone who likes this brand to take the survey and tell them to rethink their strategy. I don’t particularly like to hammer brands on my blog but I’m actually trying to help them out.

Please take the short survey by clicking on this link. I hope that you’ll agree with me that they should rather stick to their current site until they’ve revised this beta one.