If you’re old enough, you may remember a failed ad campaign done several years ago by a company called Beatrice. They decided to let the world know just how much they owned and began a series of commercials to share it with everyone. Needless to say, it didn’t work. In fact, it had the exact negative approach – it scared the hell out of everyone who saw it. Who was Beatrice and how did they manage to buy up all of our favorite brands? Were they an evil conglomerate bent on world domination? Well, if you go to culturefreak.com, you’ll find that they were just one of many publicly unknown conglomerates that own a bunch of stuff.
That brings me to #99 on the Fortune 100 list: Massachussetts Mutual or massmutual.com. They’re one of the top 100 most profitable companies and I would be a lot of people outside of Massachussetts have never heard of them. Look at it this way: they made more money than the inventor of POST-IT notes!
And yet, here they are, a high powered Fortune 99 company. But, as usual, I digress. What about the web site?
When we first arrive at massmutual.com, we have one of my pet peeves, the useless use of flash. Flash is like the quarterback of the football team – everyone loves him but if you hang around him long enough he gets irritating just like everyone else.
Flash is a great tool with so many incredible uses but that doesn’t mean you should use it every chance you get. Good flash should be clever, interesting and most of all, RELEVANT. When you visit massmutual.com’s home page, you get what essentially amounts to a stalling tactic. It ushers in the navigation. Sure, the image fade up is nice for effect but the navigation can already be there. No need to make it slide in like Santa on his sleigh.
One thing I do like about the navigation is that you can click on the main nav and the sub-navigation will stay there instead of disappearing like a typical roll over does. I get so annoyed when my mouse misses the nav I want and I end up on some random investor page three levels down with no escape. Don’t laugh – it’s happened. So the drop down menu, while effective, is not always well suited to the web. This one works and I like it.
My next stop is the fold. If you’ve worked on the web long enough, you’ve definitely had a conversation about the fold. I’m a believer that you can add content past the fold if you have a reason. In this case, the main part of the page is a picture with a random call to action. The imagery is emotional but it shouldn’t take up the whole page.
Lose some of the picture and lets see more of those places I might want to visit if I were Joe Insurance Customer.
One more thing:there’s no excuse for the messed up formatting on the bottom.
The text is totally unreadable. Could I get a programmer to post a comment on why this happens? I see it all the time. Is it the browser, poor design or just bad programming?
In spite of all of this, the site is simple, clean and has some nice tools. So, it’s okay but not on par with Fortune 500 companies.
Hey, but wait, Brett, you’re thinking. You never told me why these guys were on the Fortune 100. Well, I have two guesses at why. First, note the two languages they offer a translation for – Spanish and…CHINESE? It could be one of those secret US takeover plots they’re always talking about on conspiracy sites. My guess is #2: this looks like one of those companies that got involved in some of those interesting financial transactions that caused the economy to collapse. But that’s just my guess…