As I've seen many of you are interested in Brooks Saddles, I start a new thread to discuss the content of our website. We are planning to restyle it, so I'd like to get suggestions from you on the things you like and those you don't like of the current pages.
We'd like the website to be more interactive, what do you think of sections like the "People and Their Stories"? Should we have a section for videos from "Brooks Cyclists"? What about a specific section on signle speed and fixed gear?

Andrea

Marketing Manager
BROOKS ENGLAND LDT.
www.brooksengland.com

"It is not the name of Brooks which makes the saddle good,
but the saddle and its excellence which makes the name supreme."
(J.B. Brooks, 1912)

no more all-flash, please. awesome splash page, though. keep that.
and it would be cool to have the bike on the homepage not be a pink conversion.

The picture on the home page changes once a month and we choose pictures which cyclists post on the "People and Their Stories" section of our website. If you have a good picture please post it!
Andrea

pwned.

Should I Make a Flash Site? Flash Website Flowchart.



Seriously though. Flash is horrible. I would much rather read bare bones, Sheldonesque html than wait for a million stupid sounds and animations to play so i can look at the content.

Any of you ever check out Condor Cycles' website? They build one of the most interesting lines of bikes that I've ever come across---commuter/ audax/winter bikes that can take racks and 28s with fenders, plus lots of them have fun, fast, race-like geometry---but the site is an almost unclickable flash butchery.

I love Brooks saddles, even the old vinyl mattress saddle that came with my Raleigh. I do not like Flash. I prefer the older Brooks website without Flash to the new one. Velo-orange.com, Rivbikes.com, or yes, Sheldon brown's webpages are much nicer on the eyes than Flash.

The one thing I dislike about rivbikes is that awful pop-up product info box, where the main screen goes into shadow. Basically, anything like that where you have to watch a pointless animation load for five seconds (and where a non-standard browser like opera, firefox or Safari may hang up or crash) makes it frustrating and difficult to gather information from a website.

Yeah, VO have their site just about nailed; it works just about as quickly and simply as Harris' and it looks a little slicker.

I agree with you on the rivbikes pop-up window; I'd like it even better if I could Look at the product AND read about it at the same time.

I love the brooks website.

That bike is owned by a BikeForums member.

https://www.bikeforums.net/classic-vintage/390195-how-did-my-bike-become-brooks-site-front-page.html

Just sayin'.... .

East Hill

funny, this came up recently on DCfixed

"So, Brooks totally stole that picture from my friend Luke's (HelluvaStella) flickr page. I'm not sure if it is still up, but that is kind of weak for the company to just swipe a picture.

Still pretty cool that his bike was up on their site though."

I ride Brooks.

They didn't steal the picture! Luke/ Helluva sent the pic to them in response to a call for pics to use on the front page. Then he actually *forgot* about it, later noticed the pic was up, and proceeded to sorta-kinda accuse brooks of taking the picture without permission on an international cycling message board. Unbelievable eh? I hope he's sorry.

Oh! Reedreeder! I see what you did there.

The nice thing is, all that got straightened out, and now a representative for Brooks is a member, and he is asking how people feel about the Brooks website. Andrea is a great guy! Give him some suggestions .

A nice ending to the story .

East Hill

Brooks devotee here as well.

Also a despiser of all things Flash, particularly all-Flash sites. Frankly, I've never bothered to look at your web site because of this. Obviously I can't speak for all SS / FG riders, but we're a philosophically simple lot: one gear is all you need, right? Apply that philosophy to a web site and the unnecessarily complicated fluff that is Flash will turn us off and tune us out. Other considerations:

No sounds, or make it a positive action to turn sounds on. Why? Because often the computer makes some sort of sound that I choose while I'm perusing the 'Net. Your sounds interfere with my sounds and my sounds are more important to me.

If Flash really pulls your trigger and you must keep it, offer a no-Flash version for us old-school, quasi-Luddites who use the Internet as an informational resource rather than a scattered mess of moving pictures that contribute zero content to what we're really after.

Furthermore, with Flash I'm stuck with your font-size and font-face choices. I don't pop into your office and redecorate the place to suit my tastes, do I? Don't impose your aesthetics on my browser; I'm obsessively possessive of my own.

If your site has pop-ups, I will never see them. Why? Because it takes a positive action on my part to allow them. I already made a positive action to get to your site: don't make me do more.

I don't mean to sound like a cranky, entitlement-oriented American: these are truly philosophical points for me. Your "Catalog and Shop" page is my favorite page, except for the flipping pictures, because it loads fast and there's a smarter use of screen real estate than on the Flash pages, and I can make the font bigger (which I did) and so forth. Moreover, the content is front and center (well, after I scroll down a bit).

My perspective on design is that content is king; presentation stands in its service. I feel that you've knighted presentation and it is now exerting undue influence on your content kingdom. Reclaim your content.

I refuse to use Flash sites for commerce or information gathering. In that context, it makes things annoyingly hard to use, without adding much value.

Flash is great for cutting-edge interactive experiences, but do you really need all of that to look at a bike saddle?

I'm (among other things) a web developer, and I work with AJAX, Flex, Flash, Silverlight, etc. - all the cutting-edge tech. I've made many clients remove unnecessary all-Flash sites. Their traffic goes up, their users are happier, and they get a far better ROI.

IT would be nice if I could actually see the catalog on the site...

No more Flash, please.

i would highly suggest more flash

and lots of games too

Like a break in your brooks game where you sit on your keyboard for an extended period!

In the leather care section I'd like to see language buttons so I only need to download and print out the one language I need. Rather then waste several sheets of paper.

How about a better view of the spoke wrench in the wheel kit?

Two of the tool bags look a bit wide for hanging off of the saddle as least given my heavy thighs. Can they be hung on the rear rack. So very few of the club riders in my area use saddle bags like yours that it might help to have a picture of one ON a saddle.

Why was I not informed that this exists? Why am I not wearing this right now? Why am I not wearing this all the time?

In serious, flash--, also I have trouble navigating. Dropdown menu navigation that works on change can be a real pain in the caboose it makes it hard for all of the choices to be seen straight out.

As far as content goes, I like the stories section. Also the factory tour section was a real treat.

1) get rid of the noisy flash intro. it's unnecessarily loud/annoying.
2) design a product that isn't tacky or made of dead animal skin.

honestly, your site reminds me of 2001.
a good start might be to hire a web designer who's familiar with the concept of usability (or at least taken a design theory class or two... ugh).
leave the tacky flash for sites about kid's cereal and super hero movies.
in other words, Keep It Simple, Stupid.

*ed: whoever designed your shopping page should replace the doofus that does the rest of the site.
this is the only section of the site that didn't make me think of nickelodeon.com.

Andrea,

I love my B-17 but my guess your biggest demographic is the older crown and much of the font is just a weeeee small.