Thorpe’s 2005 Website
One of the highlights of closed season is always when the park’s new websites for the coming year are finally unveiled.
Last year was a huge disappointment as far as Thorpe Park’s website was concerned. Gone was the cool blue site from 2003, and in its place a dark grey design full of ridiculous ride descriptions (the tame family-friendly Ribena Rumba Rapids: “Sunken boulders and rapids jolt and jostle beleaguered victims. This white water experience lasts for 7 wet, wild, lurching minutes. It seems much, much longer”), hairy biker men and dodgy rock metal soundtracks. The launch heralded the beginning of Thorpe’s disasterous 2004 season blighted by sky-rocketing ticket prices, falling gate figures and cancelled events.
Today saw the unveiling of Thorpe’s site for 2005 (well, on the lesser known www.thorpe-park.com domain anyway). What an improvement!
Semantic have been put back in charge, following their one year absence when Liquorice built the site last year, which means the welcome return to the more traditional Thorpe blue colour scheme and the much-missed Thorpe Park TV.
Sadly, last year’s ride descriptions have made an unwelcome reappearance on the new site. However, the descriptions for Thorpe’s new rides - Slammer and Rush - whilst still hyping up the fear factor, seem much more “normal”. Apparently the decision to pass the sites back to Semantic was a bit last minute meaning there was not much time for them to get the new design ready, so hopefully the old descriptions are only temporary - well, you can hope!
Incidentally, the Twisted Pleasure slogan doesn’t appear anywhere I can find - maybe the marketing department have thrown their 2004 campaign hastily into reverse? No sign of Sensory Overload returning either though.
The other exciting thing for all Thorpe fanboys that arrives with the new site is the park’s new map. This year’s sees a slight modification - the same basic map graphic (with the addition of Slammer and Rush plus the removal of Eclipse, Model World and the waterbuses to be replaced with “Coming 2006 New Coaster” of course) but with ride logos rather than the ABC123 labelling system. Instead of the old box for each area, there are now just three defining “Extreme Thrills”, “Thilling and Fun” and “Young Thrillseekers” - yep, the old 5 level thrillometer seems to have been retired too.
Overall, the site is looking like a vast improvement over last year’s. Its a bit bare in places and a few things don’t work as they should, but to be fair it doesn’t appear to have been “officially” launched on the normal thorpepark.com and .co.uk domains yet. It can’t be too long before the excitement spills over once again with the launch of Semantic’s new Chessington site too.
[Blimey - have I really written this much over-analysing a bloody website?]
