Disney’s UK online store sucks
Posted in Accessibility on: Thursday, November 3, 2005 by Paul Boag
Today, I am ashamed to be British, no wait, that’s not right. Today, I am ashamed of an American multi national treating us Brits like second-class citizens. Yeah, that sounds better. Disney has launched their new UK store and has made an embarrassing hash of it.
A while back, you may remember I slated the National Trust for their new website. Well, that was nothing compared to the state of the new Disney site.
I am not going to list all the things that are wrong with it. Molly Holzschlag has done a great job of doing that in her open letter to Disney. What I will say is that the Disability Rights Commission estimate that disabled users in the UK have a spending power of £50 billion and I would be surprised if any of that make its way into the hands of Disney (at least not via their online store). If you have anything less that 20/20 vision, this site is going to be a challenge, mainly because 90% of the homepage is presented as images!
Come on people, I really thought that we had moved beyond this!
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Furthermore, I took a look at not just the Disney Store UK site, but I went ahead and clicked through to Disney’s main UK site. From their I found in their Fun Zone section something that seemed to be pretty cool. The Print Station page on their site is a great idea! I even printed a few coloring pages out for my son.
But alas, Disney can’t even get pages designed FOR PRINT to even print right! Most of the coloring pages print out in 2 pages: page 1 is the coloring image, page 2 is totally useless text that includes hyperlinks!!
Why when I’m trying to print out a nice little single sheet for my boy to color on does it print 2 friggin’ lines of text on a totally needless page 2 that includes links that are worthless in print?!?!?!
Arrrrrrgggg!!! Feel my wrath Disney!
So I have to go into my printer settings and tell it to only print page 1. Totally unnecessary Disney! What the hell?
I would have to say that Disney’s overall design all over the UK site is very retro. Unfortunately, like Dicso music, it’s not the good kind!!!The Disney site design sucks!
Oh, don’t feel -too- bad… we Americans tend to treat everyone equally like second-class citizens. Har.
Really though, it sucks. But I’m not surprised. Corporate America is taking a terrible long time in adopting modern thinking in web design. I believe there’s quite a conspiracy theory in there that involves overpriced design shops, underhanded marketing directors, and buzzword-slinging executives that hand projects out to the man with the most colorful tie.
I enjoy the podcast greatly… but any chance that the American bashing will stop any time soon?… I know we suck.. I know we say “dude” and “totally” and these are faults indeed… I was just hoping…
I’ve learned a great deal from the cast though. thanks
Hi Krystal,
hey its only empire envy! America is big, powerful and successful so of course we are going to bash it ;) lol