Military - Canadian Armed Forces

The first thing you come across is a splash page that runs a flash video with loud rock music. The video itself is pretty interesting for a short promotional we're-the-Canadian-army-and-by-God-is-it-awesome montage. I do like how they have both French and English on the video as well as links for both languages on the splash page though.

Once you get to the actual home page the first thing that happens there is a video automatically loads and plays. I promptly turn this off as I have no interest, but that's beside the point. Basically the videos (and there are a few that play at random) are mostly interviews from what I gather by refreshing the page a few times. It also appears that they have a slideshow that plays after the video is done.

I like the banner and navigation layout. It has that military/tech feel that I always associate with military sites in general. There's also an option to turn off Flash and it becomes just a regular static website, although it doesn't look as appealing to be honest. The large banner becomes thinner and the rotating images becomes a static image with a headline and links to videos. Slightly less interesting to say the least. There are a lot of links in the top and side nav bars, and by "a lot" I mean about 24 in all. Granted they all seem necessary, but it still looks a bit excessive.

I'm not really digging the way they have the links to articles and vids, etc. laid out below the banner. I can see that they have three separate rows, but it just kinda looks ramshackle to me. They have headline links and images right beside the headlines that lead to the same place, which comes off as a bit redundant.

This sites looks to be all show and hardly any detail. When I go to another page such as Army Life or Equipment, I get a quick flash vid and then the information. But the information is only a paragraph long! That doesn't seem nearly enough to me. I mean, if I were a potential Canadian army applicant, I would want more information than what they readily give.

On a side note, the Recruiting button links offsite to an entirely different Flash webpage.