LeBron James Gets New House; Should Consider a New Web Site

On my way to the office this morning, I got a call from my mother. Generally when mom calls it is bad news or good news, fortunately today was the latter. As part of her morning ritual, she logs on to get her morning news and saw a nice feature about Cleveland Cavaliers star LeBron James’ new home multi-million dollar mansion. Intrigued, she decided to take a look at LebronJames.com; so intrigued that she waited, and waited, and waited, and waited for the site to load….did I say she waited? Her lowly DSL connection took several minutes to load, but she figured a wait like this has got to be good. Once the site was up, she took a few minutes to look around, then called the biggest web head she knows, myself, her loving son. She told me about the LeBron article and her subsequent visit to LeBron James’ site. I told her that I’d take a look at the site and call her back. However, I was so disappointed with what I found that I couldn’t just give her a call back, I had to blog about it (still love you though mom).

1. All Flash Site - As a result, the load time is slow to say the least. We are on a T1 line in the office and I waited over 2 minutes for the site to load. (Two minutes, who waits more than 5 seconds?) The bad news is that all the sections are in the flash element as well and they don’t load while you look at other areas of the site, again making any navigation a…….wait.
2. Slow Load Time - As I watched the page load on and on, I noticed all the poorly done headers like “Untitled Document” for the loading page, and I couldn’t help but observe the .cfm page extension – cold fusion – seriously.
3. Dated Design - So, the all flash site finally loads and I’m anxious as my mom was pretty big on it, but when I looked, it became shockingly clear that I do not get my artistic eye from my mother. Not that it’s her fault by any means. This site design would be great if this was 1998, maybe even as late as 2002, but that’s really pushing it. The problem is that it’s 2007 and the site was designed in November of 2005, just a little behind the times, clean and simple is the new look. DwayneWade.com is a great example of an athlete’s website that is done properly. The navigation is easy and the graphics add to the look and feel, while not overpowering it.
4. No W3C Compliance - Further, the all flash design makes non-web friendly font’s prominent throughout the site and for people like my mother who need to enlarge their font size that was not an option.
5. Poor Execution - Several things were included that have potential but need to be further developed, like the journal and forum. Right idea, wrong concept, try adding a blog to the site that LeBron occasionally writes on that would keep traffic coming back regularly. As well, the games on the site are great, just improve the overall graphics and the section would be a slam dunk.
6. Improper Placement - The News section is great, but needs to be its own area accessible throughout the site.
7. External E-commerce - I’m not really sure what’s going on there, but it takes you to a completely different website; needless to say I won’t make a purchase there.

Overall, I’d have to say this site is about a 3 on a scale of 1 to 10; I’ve seen worse, but not many. Take a look for yourself, I'm sure you'll find many other items that need to be fixed - marketing to say the least. If your site suffers from some of the same issues and you’d like to talk about how to make improvements give me a call, I would love to speak with you about our services and how we can get your site off the bench and in the game.