As former Head of Internet for Investec Asset Management I originally attended some of the project initiation meetings for the redevelopment of www.investec.com, the group website for Investec, a South African investment bank. These original meetings were, by my reckoning, back in 2005 and were the result of the original Investec site coming bottom of a survey on site acessibility here in the UK.
Some 4 years later, Investec have just launched their new site. Considering the time it took to deliver this project, roughly as long as it took the Allies to combat Japanese imperialism and Nazism during World War II, I would have hoped for better results.
I was shocked to see just what has been delivered:
- The site is certainly ‘Out of the Ordinary’, (the Investec strapline) – it is very confusing to navigate. Given the site is actually just an entry page for many visitors attempting to reach the home pages of one or other of Investec’s business divisions why have they made the site so pointless from a navigation perspective?
- The site takes an incredibly long time to load. At an astonishing 782kb in size according to the site www.websiteoptimisation.com it takes 194.6 seconds to load on a 56k connection and a lengthy 42.75 seconds on a 1.44mb T1 connection. Given Investec’s South African origins, I don’t think this will go down well in today’s all inclusive South Africa. Indeed, the site will likely even take a long time to load for the rich few able to afford decent bandwith in that new democracy.
- The site is incredibly javascript intensive – a problem for visitors who have java disabled.
- It is not mobile device friendly – somewhat shortsighted in today’s digital environment – you try browsing it on an iPhone!
- No attempt has been made to map older site links to the new site structure – this leads to lots of 404 page not found results, particularly when searches are referrred from Google.
- The 404 ‘page not found’ results page displays nothing of note other than a search box – this still fails to yield results of any merit when used.
- Much of the site content is served in an iframe. This makes it extremely SEO unfriendly.
My recommendation to each Investec business unit would be to invest in paid search and an SEO friendly site structure of your own. This approach should at least allow your customers and prospects to find you without having to touch the Investec.com website. I will review the site again in another 4 years to see what if any enhancements have been made….
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Steve, you’re a moron! South Africa isn’t living in the dark ages! We actually have running water, lights, roads and believe it or not dial up is dead. The site is hosted in SA for SA users, hence the fact that it took 10 seconds to load – so the rich few and the dirt poor can do so too.
Your other comments are pretty much baseless too
I suggest you do some research on internet best practice. If the site does load that quickly in South Africa – and I’ve been told that it doesn’t by people on the ground, 10 seconds is still way too long. Imagine clicking on a display ad and the site taking that long to render. You’d lose all your traffic before it even hits the site. I also thought that Investec was now international in nature serving clients globally – not just those in SA? In such a case your infrastructure and response times need to reflect the norm in those jurisdictions in which you operate…. Even from the perspective of Investec’s audience in South Africa, according to Telegeography broadband penetration in SA is only 2% compared to the OECD average of 18.8%.
As for your comment about South Africa living in the dark ages, I don’t believe I said that at any point. You obviously also overlooked the fact that I actually worked for Investec for 14 years and spent a great deal of time out there. In fact having done some further research on the matter I came across this other site – South African in origin, that echos many of my comments - Please help Investec from committing online suicide.
Since writing this response I’ve come across a blog written by another Cape local who also shares some of my issues with the new Investec.com site. Some of the comments on the site don’t seem to make sense from my perspective. If Investec don’t really care about the SEO aspects of the site because their audience will already know them why are they running a paid search campaign to attract traffic?