New Zealand’s newest and biggest mall opened last week. Americans don’t laugh, but it’s big to us: 24ha in size with 3000 carparks. I went to go there on opening day but they closed the motorway exits due to traffic chaos and on the front page of today’s paper, they were discouraging people from shopping there thanks to massive crowds and general mayhem.

Being the googler that I am, I naturally searched to find a map to the mall and for photos of what it’s like inside and possibly info on the big opening specials. A quick search for Sylvia Park brought up a few local news stories about traffic mayhem. The top result was a link to a boring corporate-investment perspective on the mall (and later I find a tiny hard-to-spot link at the very bottom to the official site), the second result was to Welcome to Sylvia Park - so I clicked on this and found a lovely retirement village which almost choked Firefox. Haven’t seen one of those animated email gifs for a while! The 3rd-5th results were to news releases, council developments. The sixth link took me by surprise:

Sylvia Park - Homepage
Sylvia Park, Auckland - another quality property proudly owned by Kiwi Income Property Trust, Kiwi Income Property Trust.
http://www.sylviapark.org/

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I’m sure that investors are proud to own the mall but in terms of SEO, a far better description for all those shoppers looking for information would have been something like this:

Sylvia Park Mall
Sylvia Park Mall, Mt Wellington Auckland - New Zealand’s newest and biggest shopping centre
http://www.sylviapark.org/

And check out that URL. A .org?! While anyone can register a dot org domain name, “the idea is…that the organization is likely not to be a for-profit commercial endeavour.” Hello? A mall doesn’t quite fit that description.

Sure, sylviapark.co.nz and sylviapark.com are taken but why not sylviaparkmall.co.nz?

If you search for sylvia park mall or sylvia park shopping centre , the site doesn’t feature in the Top 500 sites.

So what about the site itself?

Without going into the nitty gritty code stuff, I’m fascinated by their URL structure. Each page is given a cryptic filename such as n622.htm or n516.htm. There’s nothing on the home page to tell me that it’s a shopping mall/centre - hence the reason why it performs so poorly when I searched for it.

Amazingly, the photos are being displayed as GIFs. The one I saw on the home page was a whopping 157KB in size. Switching this to a JPG with 80% quality reduces the image down to 50KB. Since many people are still on dialup in New Zealand, optimising load time is of vital importance.

Ironically, the map is a JPG, rather than a GIF. 85KB JPG vs 11KB GIF.

I checked out the news section, to see what the goss was - being a keen shopper I’ve heard rumours about shops which will be coming to New Zealand for the first time. Strangely, there’s no news since May 6th and there’s been a tonne of newspaper stories since the opening.

I’m disappointed. A brand new mall and it seems like the website is an afte thought. I can’t find any photos of what the mall looks like inside. I don’t want to open a 185KB PDF to see the mall’s layout.

I want to be inticed to go spend my money there but I’m left wondering who the site was made for - the investors? The store owners? Certainly not the consumers.

I’m sad that yet another New Zealand website is so far from what I’d love the site to be.

There’s been so much hype about the mall - on other sites - why not empower people to market the mall on their own site as well - or at least point people to reviews of the mall?

Perhaps the newspaper story today saying “Stay away from Sylvia Park” can be applied to the website as well.