It's no secret to anyone that I was not particularly impressed with the new catstevens.com. To paraphrase myself I said it was nothing more than an online brochure to promote the new album, and that the navigation was so annoying that after a couple visits everyone would hate it. What's more I felt that the content offering was so insignificant (when you could even find it) that there would be no reason to ever really go back to the site once you'd seen it once. In the interest of full disclosure, I said some other things too, which I now regret and later retracted. But having said all of that, now that the new site has been up for over a month, how do I feel about it?

I was right.

If I could have made a list of everything not to do when designing the new catstevens.com it would be a perfect description of what they actually did. I'm not joking. It's a slick online-brochure to promote album sales that is quickly annoying, hard to use, impossibly non-accessible, incredibly slow and devoid of any soul or community. What's more, it's not even a "web site." The entire thing is a single Flash .swf file, which appears to do some call-outs to display the news and other "dynamic" content. It's also 1.5 megabytes, which is unbelievably large. I can't even begin to imagine what it must be like accessing the site for a dial-up modem user. Ouch!

So when I say it's "not even a web site" what do I mean? I think it's easiest to explain by giving an example. You see, contrary to what some "Mes Amis" would like to believe, I happen to like Yusuf and am a fan of his work. I would like to keep up-to-date on the latest news and am really curious about his touring plans, and how well the album sells. The obvious way to do that is to visit the site every so often and read the news. This is where the problem comes in.

I decided to time how long it took to load catstevens.com and click on the news link before I actually was able to see the latest stories. Admittedly this is totally unscientific, I just started and stopped a stop-watch, but I think it's fairly accurate.

It took over 17 seconds.

It's important to note that I already had the 1.5 megabyte Flash .swf file cached in my browser, so the 17 seconds doesn't include download time. It is only the amount of time it took for the "Loading" screen to finish, for me to click on News, for the animation to do it's thing and the stories to finally appear. Heaven forbid I clicked on "Sing" and read the news there. I didn't bother to time how long that would take.

So in fairness I decided to time how long it took to load the home page of dashing.com and begin reading the latest stories. I could have just as easily picked any "real" web site for this, but it just seemed to make sense to use dashing. So the results?

0.335 seconds.

Ok, so I rest my case.

This could all be mitigated somewhat of course if I simply bookmarked the "News" section on catstevens.com and went straight there. But you see there's that pesky problem of it not being a web site. You can't bookmark any pages, because it doesn't have any (save the home page itself). Web sites that employ Flash in that manner effectively break the very things that make the web the web. You can't bookmark them, you can't search them and they are unaccessible to blind or similarly disabled people. It gets worse when you factor in that there's no way to skip the annoying animations, and don't get me started on the sound effects.

Now, I really don't want to not like catstevens.com, honest. I wanted to love it. I had so hoped that it would be great. But unfortunately it just isn't.

I do want everyone to know, whether you love the new site or hate it, that I tried my very best to push them in the right direction. I was very clear about what I thought they should do and told them so. Obviously they didn't agree with me. I just wish that not agreeing with me didn't translate to waiting nearly half a minute to read the news.

P.S. Would you like your very own copy of the new catstevens.com? Since it's just a Flash file you can download and save it to your computer. Right (or control-click) here and choose save. Then take the saved Flash file and drop it in your browser window. Fun for the whole family!

P.P.S. I never tried this on Windows, but I assume it should work the same as on my Mac.

P.P.P.S. That link is to their site, not dashing.com. I'm not hosting that file, just pointing you to it.

P.P.P.P.S. This could go on forever.

P.P.P.P.P.S. Alright, that's enough! Stop it!