entertainment.ie is allegedly ‘The most popular entertainment website in Ireland’, with 168,000 Irish visitors per month generating 2.5m page impressions. By Irish web standards that’s a considerable amount of traffic.
Well entertainment.ie have just launched a new site design, and I have to say it’s quite a revelation compared to its predecessor:
entertainment.ie homepage redesign
Here’s the old homepage which I pulled from Google’s cache:
entertainment.ie homepage old
There are some great improvements there. Clean design, and so many engagements points. I for one think it’s quite cool. Even the noise of dynamic imagery and flash is not so distracting a to ruin the user experience. Certainly a step in the right direction.
There’s always a but…
The big issue is that Google seems to be caching the old homepage:
This is G o o g l e’s cache of http://entertainment.ie/ as retrieved on 22 Sep 2007 06:54:44 GMT.
Why is Google not updating it’s cache since then? Normally news sites will have there homepage cache updated daily. Not so apparently for entertainment.ie.
More bad news…
It appears that whoever was managing the migration forgot about what happens when you change your site structure without considering your users and the search engines. All the old paths appear to land you on a plum 404 page.
I give it about 5-7 days before search engine traffic all but disappears for entertainment.ie - October wont be seeing 2.5m page impressions methinks. And nor will November if this is handled correctly. I wonder how much traffic to the site is SE referrals?
Downright ugly…
Take a close look in the footer of the new site:
entertainment.ie footer link
Very opaque link to ‘Event List‘. Now who could that be for? (Warning - Prepare to have your browser go berserk if you follow that link.)
All I know is whatever the intent there it wont work. That particular implementation is very misguided.
Well done on the new design though.
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