I found this via Digg.

If you are unfamiliar with “rockroll” it is a relatively dumb techy in-joke. The idea is to trick someone into clicking on a link that will send them to a video of a 1980s Rick Astley video. Well, chipotle.com got rick rolled:

This is hilarious to me. If you’re a chipotle fan/geek then perhaps this is funny to you…

The back of the chipotle menu - prices change at different locations and in different times, but this is a snapshot from September of 2007 when I did my tasting.

The text at the bottom reads:

We believe in treating all with respect:
the farmers and ranchers, the animals and the land,
and our suppliers who bring it all together for us.

We take pride in knowing where our food comes from. We look back
along the supply chain and spend time on the farms and ranches, and at
the facilities where our food is grown, raised and prepared.

We believe in using meats from animals that are raised naturally,
without hormones or antibiotics and are fed a vegetarian diet.
Naturally raised meats are in some of our restaurants. We’re working
hard to find more suppliers so we can expand to many more locations.

Our food is the best we can find — for now.
We are constantly searching to make it even better.

Speak your mind:
CHIPOTLE.COM

Cool stuff.

wow. that’s all I can say.

this is joe from speak on the chipotle.com website.

yeah. wow.

so, the other day my friend theo asked what i thought of the new website. i hadn’t seen it, so i went to look. it’s great. they’ve got a really fun website that does a good job of continuing their brand. the only problem i have with their website is what it looks like for blind folks:

so, that’s a real bummer. the problem stems from the fact that they use flash for their entire website content.

in previous versions of the site you couldn’t link to specific subsections. they’ve now fixed that, but it requires a very recent version of flash, so that means that people with dialup web access and people who are not tech savvy are also excluded from using their website.

the other problem with using flash for their website is that search engines have a hard time finding things in flash websites (search engines are only able to see the same thing as blind people…). so, that’s why a search for chipotle faq takes you to pages about other stuff rather than the actual faq page. bummer.

the site got better with this revision in some ways but it’s still traveling down the wrong road, in my opinion.

i’m a website developer and i strive to make all my sites accessible to vision impaired and blind users. Basic text navigation systems and css based layout allow me to do this.

the chipotle website uses flash for basically all of their content, this means that visually impaired visitors only get a small amount of text and miss the entire rest of the content. that’s a real bummer.

this image shows the information that’s available to a blind user who visits the chipotle website.

food with integrity, perhaps, but their website has sacrificed integrity in the name of fun/marketing.