PlanetZ forums - scopeusers.com

Just to express my concern about the web strategy of Creamware (or lack there of). I can't understand why they have chosen to create new web sites for scope and asb. The main site cwaudio.com is suficient for promoting all products, and by regularly updating the news coloumn the company appears alive and kicking! So, nothing has happened to scope.creamware.de since the release of sfp 4.5. None of the new plugins are mentioned on the page. Why make double work to maintain 2 or 3 websites?

Neb

Might be there is more than 1 company?

I could imagine the original approach was to migrate the whole website to the new design in a certain time range. be it lack of time or resources, obviously they managed to port several parts, but were not able to complete it. the news aren't ported to the new site, you're right...
since the entrypoint for most people is the old site, this may be not that important. maybe they simply wanted to launch something when scope 4.5 came out, as they did with asb and dynatube.
maintaining 2 seperate areas is not easy to handle, and if you have to workaround the current situation by establishing some solution to have at least some kinda shop back, there is even less time to care for the new pages.
I don't think they are too happy with the situation...

-greetings, markus-

It's also worth noting it's quite common for companies (including audio companies) to create individual sites for marketing specific products or brand lines. VERY common in fact,. The only real issue I've seen with Creamware's ASB / dynatube etc sites is that a direct link to purchase the product is often not seen or hard to find.

Take a person in the street
and to make it go on the CW website,
ask him what it sees ?
(It is necessary to search to know what CW sells, for the newbees)

@+

???
products are listed on the left sidebar - as you'd expect from many sites
including shop (that it's occasionally down may be another story)

the center has the news stuff (as usual)

the right side focusses on subsections of the productline

when you follow a link they first introduce the idea (on the new destination), then you can go to a product.

dunno how this could be designed clearer
I'd also choose the subsite approach, much easier to maintain and less suspect to fail in case something goes wrong.
Imho it is a very big improvement over their original system

cheers, Tom

yes, but would it be noticed (let alone regretted) by someone who just heard or read about the cards the first time ?
imho the current 'design' reflects even more 'action' than really is - and that's ok from the marketing viewpoint

cheers, Tom

the idea to let different people build a new creamware web for each line and then combine them into ONE main page without having the main page disabled for any time given.

the merging of websites into one will take place. but then again Creamware is operating on a smaller scale now. so things will take time.

you can access the other site from the main page.

Furthermore creamware, like a hist of companies, has a big offer : soundcards, plugins, ASB and Klangs... And we cannot know what is the 2007 strategy. Should you decide to have one sole website and it can become hard to handle if the offer increases...

We all know that Creamware startegy has been criticized for a long time but things are now different (not perefect though...). There are many additional plugins (3rd party and creamware - eg : dynatube) and products (ASBs and Klangs). Thanks to those latters, there are more and more reviews about creamware gear so that's what i call a marketing improvement.

Because of the ASB and Klang rush and Xmas offers (obviously a great succes), Creamware staff has been very busy for sure, so let's wait the beginning of the year...

Nevertheless, i definitly agree that a website should explain in simple words what the firm really offers. On that point, the initial website is quite good... and the ASB one is very clear too (i personally like the black / dark colors). That's just my opinion.

Don't forget, Waldorf is having a slow time starting back up again as well. They've released new products and their main page doesn't even show it. All in all CWA has done an excellent job trying to make existing products look as impressive as possible (and recycling older products into new ones, like the ASB boxes).

Shayne

[quote="ali"]the idea to let different people build a new creamware web for each line and then combine them into ONE main page without having the main page disabled for any time given.

Maintaining 3 different sites is a difficult task since many news items may balong on many sites. Just see how the Profit 12 ASB was anounced as a news at the Scope- website. http://scope.creamware.de/latestnews_pro12_a.htm

I would strongly advise Creamware to stick to the ONE mainpage that they have, which is regularly updated and which shows the increasingly wider assortement of both software and hardware on offer!

Neb