Elements is Hong Kong’s latest addition to its impressive list of high-end malls and shopping venues. Themed subtly after the five Chinese elements and offering over 1 million square feet of total shopping experience, Elements is a place to go for certain flagship shops and exclusive outlets of highly regarded brands.
Its website has been launched recently. One of the aims I would say is to promote the Elements brands, improve public attendance to the mall and the properties of its tenant shops. Since Elements has embarked a large scale advertising and marketing campaign such as the one big billboard around the Outlying Islands ferries terminal, people get to know about the mall.
Regarding its online presence, the website has got what its target mall visitors probably wanted to know: shop information, contact numbers, floor plans and driving directions. To find information about the shop Anteprima, web users simply search for a relevant term on search engines such as “anteprima hong kong” or “anteprima elements”. On an ideal situation, the top results page shows up the page within www.elementshk.com that describes Anteprima. Alas, only the shops directory page (which loads slowly by Hong Kong’s broadband standards) is visible to Google when I checked it (see screen capture below).
So when someone interested in Anteprima brand of clothing, they’d like to know where to find this shop, its opening hours, maybe its contact numbers or driving directions, they’d go to the web and perform search. These are the consumers Elements is looking for. When this Anteprima fan searches for “anteprima hong kong” she finds an Anteprima shop at ifc mall at top search engine results (see screen capture below). If your consumers can’t find you, they find your competitors. That’s what happened to a lost opportunity for Elements on Anteprima.
OK, if that user knows that there is an Anteprima shop at Elements and searches for “anteprima elements hong kong“, quite surprisingly, Elements is still hiding in the dumpster while ifc continues to steal the show (see screen capture below).
Unfortunately, this is just one example that proves Elements website, while producing good aesthetic designs, isn’t search engine friendly and is not doing favor to Elements tenants as much as ifc mall does. If you happen to be an Elements leasing tenant who also have shops at ifc or Festival Walk, you can probably validate my claim.
As much as I’d like the website design of Elements website, I’d also like it to be search engine friendly. After all, how can I see those designs if I can’t even find it online?
And please, can you wait for the website visitor to play your background music? At least to me, it is distracting.
May 2nd, 2008 at 10:26 am
yeah, most HK websites not really care for search engine friendliness. some even don’t care if users are using Fire Fox. I know HK is a small place but most people make a mistake on assuming most people are using Windows and Internet Explorer. When they design a website, they just ignore the fact not every one is using IE and they force you to use IE in order to use their websites! I mean this is ignorance and arrogant! And most Hk people are more comfortable on spending Million of dollars in traditional advertising their brands rather than building website that are both search engine and user friendly. they seem not care it
can help them on reducing their advertising cost.
anyway, it is what the fact is at the moment. hope it will change in the future!