“flowers for you”, is a Malaysian Florist Site, selling fresh flowers to certain parts of Malaysia (Kuala Lumpur, Ipoh, Penang), nothing special at first glance, but in fact, the cool thing is, they’re one of the showcased silverlight-powered web sites in Silverlight.net!!
The company have chosen to choose Silverlight, along with ASP.NET AJAX, to create their full website, where it uses a combination of video, audio, and animation to showcase the beautiful flowers they sell for various occasions.
Well, the RC1 build isn’t fully stable yet, and the web site’s large usage of video is probably the driving reason why they’ve chosen to implement Silverlight, but judging from the design of their overall site, and the animations of their catalog page… this definitely must be a site in development.
Why do I say so? Well, the first thing is, the design is almost unacceptable, especially the color schemes (i’m seeing like sooo many different colors that seriously don’t contrast and match). For the logo….its jumbled with almost everything, and the and the spinning flowers looks funny. On top of that, I have no idea why they have video in their catalog, its too distracting, and coupled with the color scheme…its almost disgusting, or maybe they just used it to showcase Silverlight’s media streaming capabilities?
The designers of the site should definitely learn from the design of sites like They’re Beautiful, which is a free virtual flowers site, founded by designers who left Microsoft, on the other hand, has a pretty simple and neat design, and the virtual flowers are very very nice, to find out more, about the site, check out this post from TechCrunch.
Silverlight isn’t always the ideal business solution, there are times when interface design is much, more important than flashy animations, and this site may very well be a case.
