When social sharing goes wrong with a 290.000 EURO budget

SMO

on February 25, 2012

Launched now is the website Close to Van Eyck which with a budget of 290.000 EURO makes it possible to discover the Ghent Altarpiece in all its details. Alas, the 290.000 EURO didn’t prevent the makers of the website to mess up everything possible when it comes to sharing the website, even the embedded sharing option resulted in a very amateur result as you can see below. Facebook Open Graph Tags anyone? No image, no title, no description, nothing except a very miserable url string. As far as Facebook sharing is concerned this is a colossal miss.

When social sharing goes wrong with a 290.000 EURO budget

When social sharing goes wrong with a 290.000 EURO budget

Here’s the result when you share the link to the website (http://closertovaneyck.kikirpa.be , which actually is also a big miss, who can remember such an url?) via Facebook.

When social sharing goes wrong with a 290.000 EURO budget

When social sharing goes wrong with a 290.000 EURO budget

Here’s the result when you use the share option inside the website.

When social sharing goes wrong with a 290.000 EURO budget

When social sharing goes wrong with a 290.000 EURO budget

  • This entry was posted on Saturday, February 25th, 2012 at 12:35 pm and is filed under SMO.
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  • Julien Charles

    I think they should have tested the websites with JavaScript disabled. It helps in order to see how the preview might look like (here, if you disable the JavaScript the website is… empty).

  • http://www.side-line.com Bernard Van Isacker

    Yes and no, if you browse the web, you are supposed to use the settings as is. The same with add-ons etc. But, it’s clear that the people behind this site have not considered anything but rendering the images (in a very slow way). Also check the very simple info page holding pictures of 500kb… that is asking for user problems.

  • Julien Charles

    My point was more that, unless I’m mistaken, Facebook/Google+ preview makers do not have an advance JavaScript interpreter that can handle the JavaScript they use. Also it does not hurt to respect the standards and add a ‘NOSCRIPT’ tag to make the site more portable.
    At least it seems this site does not use flash; it could be worst.

  • Guest

    Instead of spawning criticism, one could be constructive and e.g. direct the developers, which btw did not get the budget as stated above, to following tool:
     http://developers.facebook.com/tools/debug
    Be advised: when information is not interpreted correctly, subsequent conclusions can be misleading or opportunistic in nature

  • http://www.side-line.com Bernard Van Isacker

    The link is in the article. And yes that is the budget they got.

  • Guest

    The mentioned budget is the budget for the entire project on which some 100 people have been working. It includes the work of art historians, the creating and processing of the digital macrophotography by several specialists and so forth.