Patrick Lips – AA Gent: “Emotie is een slechte raadgever in ... - CxO

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When navigating to “Service > Parcel Shipment Prices” and entering
3020 as postal code, we get the following result: “Your responsible
individual depot is DPD Depot 0130 in 31275 Lehrte”,
which means the country is not taken into account. Also, from
a function called “Price finder”, we would expect some kind of
price calculator and not the address of a depot.
The position of the sidebar is dynamically changed depending
on the resolution (and size of the window), but the main content
is not. This is not very useful. When the window width is resized
below 800 pixels, the sidebar is laying over the main content,
which makes it unreadable. In the “Service” submenu, the last
item (Security warning) is not visible in this resolution.
There is still some work to be done to be able to compete with
other sites.
TNT (www.tnt.com)
TNT has a fresh-looking, clear and very informative web site. The
site is not very colourful, but who cares, it reflects the company
colours and works (and works out) really fine.
The site has a nice layout, permitting the user to easily find
what he/she needs. Despite the low resolution (width), the information
is very clear and well presented. A sitemap makes it
possible to easily and more directly have an overview and find
the information wanted. Also a search function via key words is
present.
The site offers easy navigation through a drop-down menu and
section specific sidebar menu. On the first screen, a country and
division have to be selected. The default language is Dutch and
language can be changed at any time to either French, English
or back to Dutch.
Lots of functionality is available online, such as Order Tracking,
DHL ABX Logistics
TNT
UPS
CxO Magazine | August – September 2006 | www.cxonet.be
booking of pickup, Shipment calculator, Price calculator, and
many more. Also mobile services such as SMS and WAP are
available.
A minor mishap is that the country list is always in english (for
example in calculation, pickup, ...) and the screen is not always
properly drawn after clicking a link. After refreshing, it displays
properly.
All in all, the TNT site is very well-presented and just simply does
the job.
UPS (www.ups.com)
The layout of the UPS web site is quite sober, but still appealing.
We see that the stress is put on a good functional layout. The
limited use of graphical elements makes the pages look somewhat
overloaded with links and the one-time visitor really has to
blink the eyes twice before starting to look what he/she needs.
Although somewhat hidden at the bottom of the page, there is
a sitemap available.
The web site offers simple and functional navigation through a
Menu bar and section specific sidebar menus. Several menus
are not available from the main (top) menu bar, but only from a
2nd menu at the bottom of the page. This can be very confusing
sometimes. We do have a keyword search available which can
make things slightly easier.
Selection of Country and language are combined in 1 drop-down
list and language selection is only possible when returning to
the home page.
The speed throughout the site is acceptable and we did not
come across any performance problems.
Order Tracking, booking of pickup, Shipment calculator and
more are available online.
DPD