all things come to them's that wait.

I love Jack in the Box. Seriously. I love their food (the cheddar potato wedges are to die for). I love their commercials. I love their whole attitude and persona. I’m a huge fan. I think the entire “Jack” character is simply brilliant. Which is why I’m nothing short of stunned regarding the recent remake of the jackinthebox.com corporate website. Don’t get me wrong. It’s attractive. It’s cool. It’s got the content (the commercials) everyone wants to see. But you’d think it was designed by someone mainlining Heinz ketchup. Slow doesn’t begin to describe it. And slow = death on the web.

Now understand that I’ve got a lot of experience building rich media websites. I’ve written two books on Flash. And I’ve won the Adobe Shocked Site of the Day for one of my multimedia extravaganza websites. In short, I know what it takes to put a site like Jack’s together. And I’m here to tell you that, no matter how cool the site is, and how much cool content it contains, they are dreaming if they think that most people will wait two or three minutes (!) for a site to load.

I’m not exaggerating. Try it for yourself. Go to www.jackinthebox.com and give it a look. It took me close to 3 minutes for the site to load. Once I got there, then it took even more time for individual pages/sections to load. Now you might expect that videos would take a while to load. But the Jack site is using FLVs (Flash video) – which typically load/stream quickly. (Don’t believe me? Go to www.grokmedia.com, click on the “broadcast” menu and try loading/playing one of the TV spots there.)

I’m sure that the design looked great on paper. Once you get it loaded, it’s attractive and fun. But if you can’t get the site to load within a reasonable period of time, most visitors won’t stick around to see the content. This can be fixed – with some tweaking, fine-tuning, and some rethinking about how the ‘weight’ of key assets and how they load.

While I’ve not seen any other indication of this, it looks to me as if they are using this redesign to launch a new corporate ID – new logo, etc. The new logotype is fun in a kind of retro 1960′s kind of way. And it’s a shame that few will stick around to see the site and how they implement the new style cues throughout.

From a marketing point of view, Jack in the Box is normally firing on all eight cylinders. They (usually) don’t miss a trick. I can only assume that, in their excitement to launch a new site and promote a corporate ID redesign, they overlooked the fact that a site that takes forever to load does your brand no favors. Here’s hoping that they figure this out quickly, and make changes in the site so that visitors will have an opportunity to experience the site and nobody will leave thinking “I don’t know Jack – and won’t take the time to get to know him.”

This entry was posted on Tuesday, March 24th, 2009 at 12:23 pm and is filed under advertising, design, marketing, media.You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Both comments and pings are currently closed.