VIA launch and Starbucks.co.uk
After all the media coverage, blog posts and online video taste testing the new Starbucks VIA coffee has been released. Its being released in three cities to start, Seattle, Chicago and also London, which I was very happy to hear about. It is so normal for any new release whether it be coffee, movie or technology to be US only first, it’s nice the release is somewhat international. Following the link on www.starbucksvia.com I could see, on a lovely clear map of which London stores had it. (I did try my local out of London store but they did not have any) Looking around www.starbucks.com I noticed how smooth it looked, how many opportunities, via twitter or www.MyStarbucksIdea.com I had to interact with ‘Starbucks the company’ and how rich in content it was that I realised that www.starbucks.co.uk really sucks as a site.
It is almost like the company has completely forgotten about it and a quick look at the Internet Archive Wayback machine shows it has not changed much since 2003 http://tinyurl.com/starbuckscouk So should Starbucks just get rid of this seemingly independent site? Would it not make more sense to have the main corporate www.starbucks.com site have an international sites option and then those sites use the same navigation, style and formating? HP.com do that, so does Apple.com.
Starbucks.co.uk looks like it was written by a 15 yr old in 1998!
Other UK coffee houses like Costa, Cafe Nero and Coffee Republic have much better looking websites, but they seem very corporate and do not offer the same ‘connection’ or interaction I feel from Starbucks.com
This will lead me to another post later…..
