TopSite Winner: Cangene Corporation
Review: Cangene Corporation
| Site: | Cangene.ca | |
| Home-base: | Mississauga, Ontario | |
| URL: | http://www.cangene.ca/ |
This month's TopSite winner was selected for the site's excellent design and navigability. The business strategy backing the site seems to be fairly simple, but the design more than compensates for that.
Cangene Corporation is a publicly traded biopharmaceutical company that develops, manufactures and markets specialty plasma products (hyperimmunes) and recombinant therapeutic products for domestic and international markets. The company's website is an example of excellent web design that looks good without taking too long to download.
Pages on the Cangene website load quickly. Once the main page is loaded (which took about 20 seconds on our computers, using a 56K modem) the following pages loaded even more quickly, as several graphics and framed pages are reused throughout the site.
The Cangene site uses a consistent first-level menu at the top of each page to help users navigate from page to page with ease. Each sections additional pages include a second-level menu on the left hand side of the page that enables the user to browse through additional information. This ease of navigation helps the user quickly access the information they need, without feeling overwhelmed or lost.
Javascript rollovers have been used to highlight items on the menu, but will not work in all browsers. We tested the site using Netscape Communicator 4.n and Navigator 3.n , Internet Explorer 3.n and 4.n - the rollovers worked in everything except Internet Explorer 3.0.
The information on this site seems to be primarily aimed at providing information for investors. It would have been nice to have a page that provided contact information for the different offices of the company. The headquarters' information is included on the main page of the site, but beyond that only email addresses are listed for different areas of the company. As well, there is a disclaimer that can only be reached from the initial splash screen (a screen designed to direct visitors into the website), and it would seem that a link to the disclaimer should have been included somewhere in the main site as well.
Despite the few shortcomings of the Cangene site, the overall design clearly puts it into the TopSite winners category. The messages of quality and excellence that the company is sending out are reflected in both the text and design used on the Cangene website.
-- CO
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