A New Look and Sound of Perfect
by Pravin on November 16th, 2007 in news.
Site visitor Jaime tipped me off to the redesign of the TheLookAndSoundOfPerfect.com site. This is the site that the HD DVD North American Promotional Group uses to em… promote HD DVD … in North America. It’s certainly different now, with one aspect being very useful and another part being a little confusing, at least to me.
The confusing part is this new Flash-based “HD DVD Simulator” at the top. I’m not really sure what this is supposed to be and how it simulates or shows off HD DVD. For one thing, they don’t use high-res video, the audio is either non-existent or underwhelming, and there’s no text or voiceover explaining anything. The interface itself requires a few tries to figure out. The little segments they play are cute in a way, but it would be nice if this was more to the point. It really just feels like watching somebody’s art portfolio.
My problem with it is that it’s the first item that all visitors see, and that top-billing should have gone to something truly useful and informative. In the old site, a video would play automatically (which can be annoying too), but I think it would have been better as the default presentation. They should have had something very obvious, and left these stranger elements for the user to discover. The old video is still there, by the way, but you have to explicity click on it to view the thing.
One of the items featured in the big central panel is a “Songs in the Key of HD” cartoon which is cute, but it’s not a high-resolution Flash video, and it’s not really about HD DVD. I think it would have worked better the song was better tied into HD DVD instead of making it a generic HD feature.
But it’s not all bad news. The site does look nice. They made it easy to learn about current and future HD DVD movies, where you can click on them to learn more about those discs. I never used the equivalent feature at the old site enough to know whether this part has been enhanced much or not, but I liked the presentation of information.
The site does not totally suck, but as an HD DVD fan, I think it could be better. Of course, I’m not the one to talk right? The first version of this hddvd.com site was not exactly stellar, and there are lots of things about the current design that could use improvement.
