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  Volume 15, December 2007
     
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We commissioned a study of corporate websites of 30 companies, in order to derive best practices. Each of the sites was researched in detail for content, layout and navigation, SEO and technical sophistication. The companies were drawn from a cross section of business models within the Information Technology (IT) industry. In this issue of Confluence, we present a glimpse into the report.

Content

Home page messaging, taglines, thought leadership, credentials and clients, use of micro sites and Web 2.0 tools were the parameters covered.

Thought Leadership

Given the flexible format, a corporate website offers plenty of opportunities to showcase thought leadership. One company whose home page is built around this is i-flex Solutions. Rather than focus on product details or the domain, since both are well established and generic, the home page devotes itself to showcasing articles and viewpoints. This is much more compelling than reading about the minutiae of product funcitonality.

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www.iflexsolutions.com

Layout and Navigation

Personalization and customization, types of navigation systems and accessibility were some areas studied under this category.

Personalization and Customization

Several of the surveyed sites offered personalization by way of country and language while a few offered personalizations for registered users. One of the more interesting attempts at personalization came from MindTree Consulting. The home page has a link named “First Time Visitor?” Choosing the link takes you to a different version of the home page, which has information on offerings and company history.

The site smartly anticipates that repeat visitors require very different information – the default home page is therefore heavier on branding and thought leadership tools.

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Default Home Page www.mindtree.com
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First Timer’s Page www.mindtree.com/corp_ie.php

Search Engine Optimization

Link popularity scores/page ranking, tagging, use of Flash and site maps are some indicators of search engine optimization that formed part of the study.

Page rank and link popularity

Link popularity is a general representation of the total number of web pages which link to a website (or individual web page). Page rank is a value that Google gives to a page, based on the number and type of links into the page. Quality of links coming into the site is thus an important factor in determining a page’s rank.

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It is no surprise that the big companies (Accenture, IBM and Microsoft) score near-10 ranks.
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Applabs(www.applabs.com),however, is an interesting example, where the number of links is far below those of other companies with comparable page ranks. This underscores the fact, that even if the incoming links are few, if the page ranks of those incoming links are high, this has a significant impact.

Technical Sophistication

Web page Auto-resizing/Resolution, back-end information capture and maintenance were studied to understand how well technology was applied.

Web page Auto-resizing/Resolution

While this may be an issue with companies that work in geographies that vary in speed of new PC adoption, most companies chose not to adopt automatic re-sizing techniques. While a large number of websites were adapted for larger resolutions, a fair number also chose to go with lower resolutions.

It is possible to build websites that adapt themselves to differing screen resolutions as well as browser windows – the last to accommodate display through multiple devices. The technique is called liquid or fluid design where the page elements adapt and fill out the available browser space. It is worthwhile considering this should you expect your website to be accessed through multiple varied sources.