What to do with the shiatsu society website?
August 7th, 2007Type “shiatsu” into google in the UK and the first hit you get is the shiatsu society. Great! The governing body of shiatsu is right up there at the top! So why does the website present such a poor user experience?
I alluded to this yesterday in my post about European Shiatsu Week. In just under a month, we have a week which should be dedicated to increasing public awareness of shiatsu, but the society’s website has very little information about what is actually happening. In fact, if you just browsed to the site and had a brief look around, you wouldn’t even know Shiatsu Week was happening. I’ll help you out though…..scroll half way down their home page and look at “Media Events”. Blink and you’ll miss it. Here’s a screenshot in case you did:
I find the shiatsu society’s website on the whole to be disappointing. Navigation is difficult and the menu structure is confusing. I rarely even get into reading the content because I don’t feel I know where to look. I don’t feel drawn in. Not to mention the fact that the website doesn’t display properly in Firefox (my browser of choice). It is a cliche, but first impressions do count, and the first impression of shiatsu on the web is poor.
Surely the society can do better!
August 7th, 2007 at 1:33 pm
I agree with what you say about their website. Maybe you can talk to them, help them make some changes?
Off this topic, have you gotten Tom Bisio’s Ba Gua book? While my martial arts consists of qi gong, nothing really intense, I bought this book as a gift for a martial art’s friend and it was well recieved. The book got many compliments.
Good day!
August 7th, 2007 at 5:18 pm
I haven’t got the BaGua book yet either…I’ve had a quick glance through it and it looks good, but to be honest, my BaGua isn’t up to much
.
August 8th, 2007 at 1:50 am
Maybe the book can help then?
August 8th, 2007 at 8:31 am
lol….maybe training more as well
August 8th, 2007 at 9:05 am
The state of their website is one of the many reasons I’m not a member. I wouldn’t join if I were just learning for fun: for me it’s a business decision. One thing I require for that is to say on my website that I am a member of such and such a regulating body, and by the way here’s a link so you can see what that means. And that’s never to happen with their website like it is. I expect any professional body that represents me to be at least as professional as I am, but I look at their website and I just don’t see that.
August 8th, 2007 at 9:29 am
I agree that website is nothing to be proud of and neither is the site of the shiatsu college (http://www.shiatsucollege.co.uk). If we people to become more aware of shiatsu then the governing and training bodies need to sort these basics out and these days a website is a basic.
August 8th, 2007 at 2:47 pm
I live in the USA and here is the biggest Asian Bodywork associations site.
http://www.aobta.org
What do you think of their site? I do some help with it so sure would like some feedback.
Bevan, well, training more helps to but we don’t always have the time we like to have.
August 8th, 2007 at 3:52 pm
I like the usability on the aobta site. The navigation is simple and well categorised. I think someone has left some debug code in there in the find a member section though – at the top of the site I get a listing of the session, post and get vars when I click “find a member”. The only thing I would improve is to display the sub-menus in each section. So when I click into “About AOBTA”, I would like to see the sub-menu (By Laws, Board of Directors etc) without having to hover over the main menu again. But that’s a pretty minor point