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Summary:
Websites may not be able to look cool when they have to address an uncool audience...but they can ashamedly try.
This is a review of a single small website, but quite funny nonetheless. I was helping a student a website evaluation of Nelly's corporate website, nelly.net. Nelly appears to be a "gangsta" rapper/singer of the corporate national recording company sort. (My apologies to Nelly fans if this is not true, I am ignorant of the artist!)
What is interesting about the audience for this sort of music is that it is likely to consist of two distinct groups: half of the fans are likely to share a common ethnic and social background with the artist, and the other half will be suburban teenagers, who share little background with the artist.
This sets up a problem for the corporate website designers: which culture should the website address? They had a unique solution to the problem--address both cultures, but be embarrassed of the suburban teenagers.
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(Top): Original navigation bar from nelly.net [11/13/03].
(Bottom) Brightness and contrast were significantly increased.
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Notice that all non-white text is nearly invisible until a mouseover highlights it (as is seen in "sign up"). Mouseovering reveals the "suburban teenager lingo." Let's hear it for corporate sites ashamedly hiding the truth--those who they expect to frequent this site are suburban teenagers, and this market doesn't understand the culture they are buying into enough to decipher the meanings in the navigation bar links!
[It is possible that the headings are so stylized that NO ONE could decipher them, but I will ignore this possibility because it is not nearly funny enough to write about.]
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