Rayboy

One of the top banks in Kuwait. Gulf bank stands out for its services rendered to both the Residential and Corporate Markets. After its major financial issue where it had investors deal in derivaties, which coz’d its Stocks to fall. It had a super comeback and get its ratings back again worldwide.

I have been personally using the online website basically everyday to check on my bank ac, credit card etc and i should say, that their online banking  is amazingly user friendly and straight to the point. However for the website, its got its plus points as well as its flaws.

The Plus points :

1. What i like about gulfbank website is the amount of reading content. They try to clear maximum doubts by the amount of information on their services. Their copywriting is clear,  to the point and very self explanatory.
2. Their color scheme is pleasant, works exactly as per their brand image. but i have seen companies who have abused their color schemes to serve their own branding and left the consumer with an eye sore. The minimum usage of Red and more stress on white background with clear text, ensure readability.
3. They got great Loading time, objects like flash are kept to the minimum, pages which have flash are low weight.
4. its rare that i found their site having a downtime, which is a very good thing!

The bad :

1. In Contradiction to my first point. too much content means loads of responsibility to organise it. there are times, we need information like “ATM points” , “Opening hours of a branch” etc.. it used to be difficult to pin point. but the moment we get it, its a breeze.
   • A suggestion for this is to keep commonly viewed queries easily available.
   • A Sitemap for the website would be amazing.
2. No Printer friendly page. Sometimes we try to print some documents and the print view ends up including all the side navigations etc. Sometimes we need these documents as references. but its wastes ink, paper etc.
3. Broken links, images. This is becoz some of the pages are under HTTPS , while the css and images are under http, which causes the page to disrupt.  Here care should be taken to check every link on the site, no matter how big it is.
4. From a design perspective, the consumer section of the website. i would love to see more people photos , this would ease me in dealing with this vendor. Everything is too corporate for a new consumer, this might keep him/her on the defensive.
5. No response to online forms. i dont blame the website for this, but i have had people who write to them over the online forms, dont get a response back. Now if this is a technical issue, then i would blame the website. but if its the bank not getting back , then it they need to work on their policies.

Technology Used :

1. it seems the site is done in JSP. im not sure about the backend, but i suppose Oracle, but definitely a SQL compliant db.
2. The Websites’s name servers are shared between Kems and Fasttelco.

Overall, its a great site, with loads of opportunity to improve and serve. Visit them here : www.e-gulfbank.com

(5 votes, average: 3.60 out of 5)

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