September 12th, 2005
How the Gap Completely Blew Its Site Redesign
By Alice Hill
RealTechNews
Alice’s Rant of the Week: Rule one in the world of online: you do not go dark ever. As in never. As in only if you have an earthquake or a power outage or your server cluster blows, and even then, you better have figured out backs-ups and redundancies and co-locations and so on. Once CNET.com (my old stomping ground) went down when San Francisco had a power outage and it was down for about four hours. It was also 1996 and you can bet that doesn’t happen anymore.
Fast forward to today and we find out that the Gap (and sister store Old Navy) shut its site down for days on end in order to “re-design. This is unthinkable, when you consider how important online selling is, how the Gap based its in-store inventory on a reduced model and then let the Web handle size 52 width jeans and 36 length pants and so on.
“Hoping to minimize the customer inconvenience, Gap Inc. waited until after most back-to-school shopping had been finished before launching a “soup-to-nuts” overhaul of its major e-commerce sites, said company spokeswoman Kris Marubio. “We think this is going to make for a more compelling and exciting experience for shoppers,” Marubio said.
“The San Francisco-based company isn’t disclosing when the sites will reopen. Instead, visitors are being asked to leave their e-mail addresses with Gap.com and Oldnavy.com so they can be informed when the sites are selling clothes again. “It’s major project for us so we know it’s going to take some time,” Marubio said. She warned the company may still have to fix some bugs even after the sites reopen. “Source: USA Today via TechDirt
Alice Says: The Gap site is up today (although it goes up and down, so be patient) and for all that waiting, it’s nothing special. The people who bungled this redesign should be taken out and shot. I know the world is starting to feel like it’s 1996 again, but c’mon., surely we can keep our platforms up and running.
Lockergnome's Tech News Watch says:
How the Gap Completely Blew Its Site Redesign
Rule one in the world of online: you do not go dark ever. As in never. As in only if you have an earthquake or a power outage or your server cluster blows, and even then, you better have figured out backs-ups and redundancies and co-locations and so on…
September 12th, 2005 at 11:52 am
eric says:
I completely agree about never going down. How can a real company afford to do this?
Even when updating our corporate design for a company I worked for just recently we did not go down at all. We pushed the design up for testing, made all our final tweaks, then pointed the virtual directory hosting our site to the new (tested) folder. It worked like a charm, and I’m shocked to hear that a multi-billion dollar company had to resort to pre-90’s downtime.
September 13th, 2005 at 3:15 am
Mike says:
call the Beijing woman - she can handle this one
Mike
gotta love technology - bet the web designer told them there is no other way to do it..lol..
September 13th, 2005 at 4:29 am
Alice says:
You develeop a new ssystem on a new set of servers then one dayyou flip the swicth - max time down a few hours and even then ther are ways to stagger that.
September 13th, 2005 at 7:31 am
Keith says:
I disagree about going offline for two weeks. If they had simply developed a new system in tandem and then one day just switched over, nobody would be talking about it. I think it was a bold move to completely shutdown and generate some buzz, some hype and a little consumer anticipation then re-launch the whole group of sites. I like it and here we are talking about it…
September 13th, 2005 at 8:27 am
charles says:
As a technical statement, the sites suck. The ability to see your future purchase in a multitude of available colors is NOT new technology; other clothiers and EVERY car website allows you to see how your car will look in a vast array of offered colors, when you go to the design my own car directory.
As an attention-getter, it shows the lack of followthru that seems rampart in Corporate America today. You went dark to draw attention to your site, when a flash cut to a newer site would have kept you up and serving customers, to get some press from Alice and the NYT writers, and then you don’t buy enough bandwidth to keep the site up when the crowds you stunted for, hit your site!
Pitiful.
September 13th, 2005 at 8:47 am
Dave Barnes says:
The Gap redesign is worse than you think.
My wife (of the long legs) is a Gap online shopper.
Two weeks ago, she went to the site and it consisted of a single page that essentially said: “Under Construction”.
Last week, she returned and it appeared to be up. So she started to place an order, but could not complete the process. So she called (you know, that archaic device, the telephone) them to place her order via the phone and was told: “We can not take your order.”
As my wife builds websites for a living and our small customers would not tolerate this situation for their relatively unimportant websites, she was floored.
“We can not take your order.” This tells me that their entire backend is messed up.
,dave
September 13th, 2005 at 10:46 am
Mike Masnick says:
Hey… it’s cool that you found this via Techdirt, but it’s pretty standard to actually link to the site you found it from. You can link to whatever you want, of course, but just pointing out how people normally do it.
September 13th, 2005 at 4:25 pm
Alice says:
Hi Mike- sorry about that. It is our policy as well to always link to our sources. I will correct it assap. We love your site.
September 13th, 2005 at 4:33 pm
Lockergnome's Tech News Watch says:
Gap Web Blunders Continue, Mac Users Not Welcome
Dave Zatz, Contributing Writer for RealTechNews, writes: As we originally reported, Gap brand Web sites shut down for a redesign. We stand by what we said then, “Rule one in the world of online: you do not go dark ever. As in never.” However, it seem…
October 7th, 2005 at 12:48 pm
Alex says:
I was browsing a month ago (March 2006) and they did it again! I went to the gap website to see where stores were, and the entire site was shut down!
May 7th, 2006 at 2:46 pm
sheena says:
gap.com really has nerve. they sent out an email blast promising free shipping and 10% off for their anniversary, and their freaking site isn’t up. wah!
November 6th, 2007 at 7:23 pm