Communicate

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Communicate is pretty cool. We were listening to Puffy Puff Dad long before any of you youngsters. We’re dead into Justin Timberland, and we have the complete DVD collection of Grey’s Astronomy. The Notorious B.F.G. is on our speed dial. What’s that? Dead, you say? Oh.

Ah, who are we trying to kid? Communicate is baffled by most modern cultural fads, and has no idea what is “cool.” Perhaps that’s what made our arrival in Hoganworld.com a little tough at first.

Hogan, from what we can gather, is a fashion brand. We can’t gather much, because one thing the Web site skimps on is a bit of background for the company. Never mind, a few Internet searches and we find out that Hogan is a clothing brand that started in the early 80s with a shoe inspired by cricket.

“Hogan immediately expressed its strong personality: young, dynamic, cosmopolitan, innovative, open-minded. The international attitude is blended with the Italian design, that represents the uttermost point in terms of appeal and quality,” says the brand’s Facebook page.

An invite for the site arrived via snail mail. Intrigued at the company’s effort – a fancy folded cover and transparent printed invite – we took a deep breath and plunged ourselves into Hoganworld for the first of our new occasional series of Web site reviews, Sites. From the look of it, Hoganworld is a pretty cool place.

The luxury apparel and accessory brand’s Web site does not beg to be entered. It doesn’t grovel for your business, nor stamp its feet and demand some attention. It’s not about presenting a slick online transaction machine, and it won’t please everyone who logs on. It simply looks at you nonchalantly in fashionable clothes, shrugging in a very European manner, as if to say, “I look good. You don’t.”

It’s an almost timeless black and white world, like an arthouse European movie. However it’s also a bit sanitized: the same art house effort filmed in high-def by a middle-of-the-road director. Adventurous but safe; artistic but not challenging.

The site opens on a street scene, which unfortunately is probably the least impressive visual the site has to offer. It’s like a CAD drawing of part of Birmingham. (If you’ve been to Birmingham, you’ll know it would take more than a CAD effort to sort it out. At least Hoganworld is nice and clean.)

From this main scene you can use a pop-up navigation bar or tags in the picture to navigate the site. The tags are a mystery, as they seem to be quite arbitrary, not attached to anything in particular. When you click them, you fly through the street to your chosen destination. Communicate likes this; we like to make a whooshing sound as we go. As it is, there are no sound effects, just the ongoing soundtrack comprised of a continuous loop of some generic funky stuff.

Depending on what destination you have chosen you can visit the store, see the collections, check out key dates from the company’s history, and even fiddle with the jukebox. It’s nicely done, but it feels a little unfinished, like at the moment there’s not quite enough to do. And novice Internet users or those with slow browsers may want to steer clear – both may struggle with the site’s complexity.

For unknown reasons the screen moves slightly – a wobble – while you’re standing still in the ‘city.’ Quite why is unclear, but its like trying to concentrate on something when on heavy medication.

Hogan is not the first to create such a cityscape, so we can’t award points for ingenuity. Many think this is the future for online brand presence: interactive, digitally created Web worlds that we step into to become an active part of a brand. The question, then, is have they done it right?
Well, there are a few rough edges – the lack of information on the brand and its background, for example. Who is behind it, what are its values? This is an era of cheap loyalty and little trust, and details like that can be key to building relationships between a brand and consumer.

But this is a fashion brand, and they are too cool for that. They probably get away with it because consumers like to be part of the cool set, and the site does give users that feeling. It’s something brands should bear in mind, though – transparency builds trust, and it’s not necessarily mutually exclusive to being fashionable.

Overall, we’ll forgive these oversights. Yes, it’s all a little intimidating at first. Yes, content is limited. But if Hogan keeps its promise on the invite (“This thriving Hogan metropolis will change throughout the year… creating an ever-changing interactive cosmos.”) then this could grow into something pretty funky, if we know what’s cool.
Which we don’t.

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