Anyone checked out the website recently

It reads like French translated to American English, which is a pretty bad combination :flushed:

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“Decoupling sockets to cut off interference from incoming mains power and suspending circuit boards on brass sub-plates to create an isolated environment for critical electronics are two applications of this principle”.

In this day and age I wouldn’t be making too much about brass. Platinum or Iridium something classy like that but brass - brass beds and door knockers but not if you’re selling top quality hi-fi - it may be perfect for it’s job but why mention it - just sounds cheap and nasty.

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I also wonder if anyone who’s not familiar with the product already will be able to make heads or tails of it. Why not just mention it’s a pre-amplifier ?

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Agree. It’s gobbledygook.

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Yet more evidence of the inappropriate and over-use of (marketing) hyperbole and superlatives. Er, ‘maximum clarity’, so you’ve stuffed the sales of Naim’s ‘better’ pre-amps then :scream:

One has to ask who approves the copy for nonsense like this?

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Fans of Only Fools and Horses will know this term, which may answer your question.
T-shirt awarded for good measure.

Unknown

Fans of Fawlty Towers, would perhaps be more inclined towards “Nitwit”.
You can just see the question “…what is (ze) nitwit…?” being asked.

Based on repeated testimony at the Post Office inquiry this likely applies.

“I wish I had looked more thoroughly and asked more questions”.

To coin a term, that is bleedingly obvious: no-one, or no-one who cares one jot about the impression given to customers, existing or potential. That entiment clearly applies to the entire site as launched. To me it appears that it was designed to meet a certain visual style that appeals to a person or persons in a position of power, who probably nodded and said “job well done” without any consideration for the [normal] business purpose of a website…

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Somehow how after (many, how many?) years of the new website being worked on, and then this being the result, it does sound like it’s worthy of a Fawlty Towers episode.

But thinking about it, this probably wasn’t the result of years of development. This was clearly done by a junior with no experience in web development, or knowledge of web development standards, combined with equally junior (or incompetent?) people working on the UX design. And then the same for the actual content.

But even then, I don’t think what we see now actually took years. So indeed the question is, what happened to the website that was supposedly being worked on? Maybe @Innocent_Bystander has a point saying management up top got fed up and just “got it done” ?

Earliest mention (04/2020) I could find: Naim’s Website - #22 by Richard.Dane

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Yes, maybe so, could be someone who sold watches back in the day…

I would say there was a brief , and that brief was not set by Naim , it wanted harmony with the Focal website , as there are seemingly two companies that should have synergy but it is difficult to find.

Next year there may be a downsizing move for me and if so it may have “implications” for the audio system as I may be in a flat. I have looked at the websites for Technics, Arcam, Rega, Denon and Graham Slee .

The worst by far is Technics , and Arcam has some strange choices in it, Graham Slee and Rega seemed fine and Denon was close too them with only one error that I could find.

There is obviously literally zero chance that this website cost four years to build. My guess is that if there was something being worked on then it was vetoed by Vervent Audio Group who would’ve wanted the brands to align more. And as Focal uses the exact same technology and layout for their website already it would have been a case of taking that template and populating it with Naim content as that would have been the cheapest option. I’d be surprised if it took more than a few weeks to do (aside from pictures and videos).

Agreed!

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The devil is in the detail

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Oh, and of course this is more than likely another reason it is taking so long to change things. They cannot just stop the Naim homepage causing anxiety and seizures, as fixing things will impact the global website style and they would have to adjust the Focal site as well.

I don’t get that other than style, and even with style the Focal site doesn’t have the jarring opening video and meaningless moving posturing of a “dancer” so that is hardly part of the group corporate image. Getting content accurate and correct, and including all relevant/useful customer assisting detail need not alter site style.

We could run a book on why/how and how long it actually took to produce, - but I’m sure we’ll never know which of our guesses is right!

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And you can bet on that

I meant company global website style and design.

Here is a detailed explanation: To properly fix any animation on the site, the pause button, which is now at the bottom right of the video clips, will have to be made a lot more obvious and not cause the user to have to scroll through the video to find it. So it has to be moved to the top of the video to be immediately findable. The button border and iconography will need to be at least 2 css pixels wide and have a guaranteed contrast of 3.1:1 to the background. For example in this state the contrast is 2.1:1 and only one pixel wide.

Screenshot 2024-05-15 at 09.08.15

The keyboard focus outline style also suffers from this and need to also differ in contrast from the border of the button that it is now touching so it should be extruded and also be 2 css pixels wide.

Doing this will make it conform to the WCAG standard and make it possible for users to easily find the control and stop the animation before it causes health effects.

But these kind of things will be baked into the website code and the overal template used for both websites and is not content. So if they change this is would mean the Naim website differs from the Focal website and that will go against company UX more than likely.

The website is rife with other such accessibility issues that goes beyond content only.

But I guess that begs the question, are they indeed running the same code? Or was the brief just to use the same tech and design?

I’ve seen it a few times before where it was “cheaper” to just build something new instead of expanding the existing codebase. Often with the idea that it could be merged later (which I don’t recall ever actually happening).

Does the Focal site suffer from the same basic issues?

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Not even meeting basic accessibility standards for a company website is pretty poor really. You would think they would be concerned if the flashing images caused a user to have a seizure. Well, maybe not……

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Many of the same issues exists, yes.

Depending on how you build a website you can have much in terms of common code and components across different websites. For example, building a website using Wordpress you will have the common theming and JavaScript and HTML across all websites built using a specific WordPress theme. It’s only the content that changes.

The same has happened here. Even opening the network inspector shows many of the exact same JavaScript files to be loaded on the Focal and Naim websites.

These days, unless you need something really specific, no one builds websites 100% from scratch. You use prebuilt themes or component libraries. The challenge is finding the tooling that supports good function and accessibility.

For example, right now I am working on a website in React and I use the React Aria Components library as it provides many complex components that are WCAG accessible: React Aria Components – React Aria . I could also have used one of a myriad of available React component libraries that are not accessible and that would lead to a website with accessibility problems.

But unless you have lots of time and a very big budget you cannot build it all from scratch anymore, even if you have the ability and knowledge to do that, there would just be too much to do with the requirements of interactive websites these days.

Yes, I agree, especially for a UK based company as the accessibility standard in the UK is actually pretty high. I often use gov.uk as an example website to show how to build something accessibly. In the EU, the WCAG is the basis of current legislation, so there are legal requirements to conform to it, but sadly, it is not enforced equally well everywhere yet. It is slowly improving though.

And unfortunately, general accessibility on the web in general is pretty bad still. WebAIM runs a yearly scan of the top 1 000 000 web pages and this is the latest result: WebAIM: The WebAIM Million - The 2024 report on the accessibility of the top 1,000,000 home pages

A lot still needs to be done.

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