Apparantly RyanAir have spruced up their website a bit. I use the word apparantly for good reason. Take a look at it in today’s state (click all images to enlarge).
Not exactly at the forefront of design. Now take a look at it one year ago. Notice any major differences?
Lets travel back further, 2002 this time…
Ouch. If you want to travel back and view the murky designs of previous RyanAir design disasters, then feel free.
RyanAir are one of the most successful companies to come out of Ireland yet their website looks like it was scribbled down on a peice of paper, faxed to India, coloured in by an elephant, faxed back to Ireland and then plopped onto the Internet with drastic consquences - The homepage has 103 validations errors.
Some companies have pretty websites but they don’t necessarily rely on them as a point of revenue. Guinness for example, they have a pleasent to look at website but they use TV and media other than the Internet to monetise their product. RyanAir receives the majority of its business via their webpage, so why don’t they have a website which is aesthically pleasing, designed to a high standard, coded with standards in mind and way oh way don’t they use the € symbol for their pricing instead of £ when you view their site via ryanair.ie? Surely they can check the referring webpage and present the webpage in the correct currency?
I actually quite like RyanAir as a company and Michael O’Leary as a CEO, but their website is piss poor! If you are going to sell online then put in the effort for God’s sake. A plus point for RyanAir is the functionality of their site. You don’t have to be a genius to naviage around it.
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12 responses so far ↓
Almost as hideous as their seats. I think they actually pursue a business strategy that strives to have the ugliest planes, the worst service and the greatest drive to be first in the race to the bottom.
Possibly! They’re doing a good job anway. You can’t take that away from them!
The times I have flown RyanAir I have never had a problem with them, but I’m not that much of a flyer either.
As long as they keep costs down I’m going to be happy, but if they could invest in photoshop I’d be happy too.
Thanks for the comment Andrew.
Does it really matter what the site looks like, it does what it’s meant to do - put bums on seats with as little fuss as possible. Who cares about all the other stuff. If it was a company struggling and you were making the case that maybe a better designed site would help their fortune I could get where you are coming from.
Alan, it is functional. It isn’t graphically nice to look at though.
Take a look at two of their rivals
BA - http://www.britishairways.com
Aer Arann - http://www.aerarann.ie/
Both of those sites follow the same exact structure as the RyanAir one but are far more professional looking. It doesn’t hurt to have a well designed website behind you. But if you have an ametur website then that might reflect on a ametur business.
they probably have an in-house “developer” that does exactly what he gets “paid” for.
The irish market still has a long way to understanding the value of internet.
The first thing they look for when deciding to get a website for the business is price, then how quick can be done and lastly (maybe) functionality.
Granted it wouldn’t hurt if they made it looked prettier but if it ain’t broke…
Not even a trackback you mean fecker! You even stole my comparison of BA to ryanair… lack of creativity from you boyo!
I think your going overboard by going into that much detail on the website, I mean what do you want from it? if it was graphically amazing it would probably (not definately) take a lot longer to load and people would be complaining about the load time performance of the website.
\”Granted it wouldn’t hurt if they made it looked prettier but if it ain’t broke…\”
But that\’s just it Alan. It IS broken. If they cleaned up the code and used some of the technology a bit more responsibly, their site would be accessible to an even wider audience!
Also, if they paid some attention to the technical end of SEO, they\’d be more successful on search engines too. Run a search for \’cheap flights\’ on Google and Ryanair doesn\’t rank too well. It appears at the bottom of the second page, way behind its rivals. You\’d expect more from such a high profile site.
Chris actually pointed out the refurbished ryanair site to me earlier (sorry about the lack of a ping) -
If the site was coded properly it would load quicker, as has already been mentioned. Plus it is very graphical and the load times aren’t that great. A site can be graphically pleasing without the use of jpegs/giffs. They could optimize the site much better thru a better use of CSS and by using external js files for their javascript. Christ there is some load of JS there!
The site breaks a whole load of accesibility and seo rules for what is a e-commerce site from a company whose business model can’t be rivaled by any of their competitors. That is shocking to be honest.
I hadnt looked at the source. Its a joke that in this day and age they have inline JavaScript and seem to be using tables rather than a css div layout. You probably wouldnt see a hell of a lot of a difference with regard to load times but caching does help.
“Also, if they paid some attention to the technical end of SEO, they\’d be more successful on search engines too. Run a search for \’cheap flights\’ on Google and Ryanair doesn\’t rank too well. It appears at the bottom of the second page, way behind its rivals.”
Thing is they have such a strong brand that when anyone thinks of cheap flights they think Ryanair automatically - no google search needed. But having said that, they need a kick up the bum for having a second page ranking!
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