I had a taste for a salad at lunch yesterday. My first stop to check the nutrition values was Burger King’s site. I checked their TenderGrill Chicken Salad since it’s my favorite. Even with full-fat dressing, it comes to only 490 calories (that includes their yummy garlic parmesan croutons) which turned out to be lower than any of the quasi-appealing salads at McDonald’s or Wendy’s. [Why is everyone obsessed with bacon bits? Is it just me who doesn’t care for them?] But this isn’t as much about the food as it is about their website. Although I have noticed that ever since I started counting calories again, I’m appreciating the food I eat more. Or obsessing over it. Semantics.
I understand that everyone and their brother codes their site to include Flash these days. It can be nice, there’s no doubt. But what it can also be is slow and annoying. That’s where BK’s site comes in. Granted, it turns out it’s slower in Firefox than IE, but still, the web designer should have tested their site in the two most popular browsers, don’t you think? Furthermore, I don’t want to watch a paper bag with BK’s logo on it rotate into different shapes and then turn into another animation representing the navigational item I’ve chosen before I get the result I want. If I ask to see the nutritional info, just show it to me. And how helpful is a flash map if I can’t copy and paste the address? I have to write it down? What’s that all about? I think they should worry a little less about how “cool” their site looks and code it to be quick and easy to use. A foreign concept, I know!
You are not the only one having this beef with fast food websites. http://www.bkennelly.com/vox/archives/002438.html
I know what you mean about flash. Milan and I are going to vegas in october and I was looking at a hotel to find out prices and it was flash and after 10 minutes of having the site open, only 9% of it had loaded. I emailed them telling them their site was shockingly slow in loading and asked if they could just please tell me their rates for the days we were there. They replied saying that they can’t give rates via email and that I would need to visit their site to get the rates. I replied saying if they read my email they would have seen that the site wouldn’t load for me and thanks anyways..i’d go to a different hotel with a site that actually worked!!