August generally marks the beginning of the trickle of new snowboard kit hitting the shelves all over the world. It also is the time when all the film-makers launch their new flicks and manufacturers launch their websites showcasing all their goodies for the 08/09 season.

Being an interactive designer for a living, I have high standards when it comes to site design and it’ll take a pretty decent site to impress me. That being said, simple is always good to! So here’s a round-up of this seasons new websites so far. (Don’t hold your breath, there are a lot of unexpected let downs here).

DC SNOWBOARDS

Oh come on! You’re telling me that someone with Ken Block’s money, and DC’s style allowed this site to make it onto the internet. This site is POOOOR. Then again when racked up against the rest of the DC site it kind of fits. You only have to fire this up on a 1024×768 screen to start having problems – a Flash scroll bar within an HTML scroll area…..OMG. But it doesn’t stop there. Whoever designed this site must be getting paid by the scroll bar, you just have to select a board to get another scroll area on the left, then another on the right. I make that a count of 4. On that note I shut it down, this site officially sucks!

NITRO SNOWBOARDS

They’ve certainly crammed a lot of info into this site. And when I say crammed, I mean it. It just feels too busy from the home page onwards. BUT, unlike the DC site, I did want to explore more. So I made it past the annoying horizontal board scroller and now Im looking at a board. This is great. I love the info layout and the sizing matrix/rating chart at the bottom. And the best bit – the HUGE image zoom, biggest I’ve ever seen on a board site and it really let me see the graphics proper good.

VANS SNOWBOARDING

So this site from Vans isn’t too bad. And for me to say that it must be pretty good. In fact compared to DC, this site is a masterpiece! I like the flash/HTML mix, the zoomable boot feature, good tabbed information layout. Like the interactive Team area. Like the Video section.

SESSIONS

When is Sessions going to stop using the same web template that they’ve been churning out for the last 4 seasons? If the old saying “if it aint broke dont fix it” applied then I’d understand, but in this case its “it’s broke, go fix it”. Something about their clothing line is reflected in this site. Its a bit huuuumppphhh. Just a bit nothingness. I’d love to be able to zoom up those small clothing images for a start.

BURTON

This is a bit unfair. Burton have a whole lotta cash to throw into marketing (although so do DC and look where that took them!) so I’d expect pretty good things from the big B. PLUS they have their own in house design team and work with some of the most talented Ad Agencies in North America. And it shows. This site is what a product site should be, although some will argue and say it has no soul, I think the mix of Flash/HTML/Blog/News/Video/Photography is hard to top. The products are fully zoomable which is fantastic. The navigation is interesting yet intuitive. Everything loads real quick. Overall a big thumbs up for what I deem to be Burtons best effort in years.

K2 SNOWBOARDING

So I cant finish this post on a high note, there has already been far too much ranting gone under this bridge. So lets finish with K2’s new site. Can anyone say “black”. Man this site feels so heavy. Black (and green) overload, with white type, and a lot of it. Fair enough, there is some very cool video features, and some nice photography, but its all so small I cant see the product. Example – this is the first year K2 has introduced a number of different Rocker profiles to their line… a pretty major achievement. But to explain this they’ve stuck up a picture so small I cant see the difference between the three boards. Useless. Overall this ones getting a thumb half cocked.

I may add more sites to this post as they creep online. I’ve just scratched the surface of snowboarding’s corporate efforts online but at this rate lets just say, you’re better getting off your @rse and going down to your local store to check kit out. WAY more enjoyable!

Entry posted on August 15th, 2008 and filed under Snowboarding, Websites. You can follow any responses to this entry through the Übergood RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response or Trackback from your own site.