Digital Design Blog

Does Your Corporate Web site Make You Look Fat?

Large corporate Web sites have become increasingly bloated in recent years. In trying to provide a full picture of everything the company does they have been weighed down by an overstuffed diet of confusing content, navigation and functionality. It’s time to trim the fat.

Think thin.
Global corporations offer a huge number of products and services, each with their own set of packages and add-ons. But most of the information corporate Web sites give about these products is boilerplate and, as such, doesn’t pull its own hefty weight. If users have to drill down through three or four levels of sub-navigation just to learn that you have a given product, you’ve already lost them.

The thin corporate site puts messaging first and last, with your set of offerings briefly noted in the middle. A well-architected site will give users enough of an overview of what your company offers with a minimal amount of skimming. The focus should not be on what you offer but why those offerings are better.

Ford uses a simple navigation model that puts more focus on their brand values than on the full lineup of vehicles. And the featured vehicles are offset by the global messaging. This thin site puts the emphasis on innovation, history and good works, letting the individual brand sites carry automobile and dealership info.

General Electric’s positioning is all around innovation so their section on jet engines, for example, ties together an animated history, beautiful info-graphics and video to tell the story. Nobody is going to order a milliondollar jet engine over the Web, so the site is more about promoting the company and its position by highlighting key product lines and proving their value within the overall family of GE.

Show off your good side.
The essence of your corporate site ought to be its value as a messaging platform (it’s controlled by e-Marketing for good reason). The average site visitor is only spending a few minutes (if you’re lucky) before moving on elsewhere. In that short time, you need to show them what’s best about the company. A 500-page site isn’t going to accomplish that, no matter how well your navigation has been structured.

Smile, then invite them over.
You�ll fail in the long run if visitors just browse through a few pages of the site and leave. Do you want your users to sign up for something, buy online, create an account, or contact a salesperson? Whether hard or soft, calls to action are essential to converting casual browsers to active clients. By trimming down the rest of the site, these calls to act become much more prominent.

IBM has a call to a pre-selected contact form that routes your request to the right department, as well as upcoming events where they can find potential customers.

State Farm Insurance goes light on the product overviews�but has all the right calls to action to convert browsers to customers. The details on insurance can be overwhelming, so State Farm has opted to give a confident overview of its offerings so users know enough to take the best next step towards becoming customers.

Tone the easy parts.
Employment, press room, and investor information site sections have all been standardized. The users of these sections are self-selecting and task-oriented towards a specific goal. But so many companies still get them wrong. The basics of these sections are about providing a simple interface to a data repository — the list of jobs, press releases, press images, or quarterly reports. But corporate sites should be able to go beyond that to wrap messaging around the raw data. Why should somebody work here? Why should the press cover one of our thought leaders and not our competitors? Why should analysts rate the stock an “outperform?” With such focused users, corporate sites can create powerful experiences that help reinforce brand.

New outfits for different [user] occasions.
Your customers needs are varied. You need to be able to quickly launch new campaign sites that target a narrow set of users for specific offerings.

Those campaigns need to be accessible from your corporate site, and always tie back to the messaging platform you set up. This is a crucial role of corporate sites that so many miss. Just as print ads, billboards and TV spots can�t run the same message for too long, neither can corporate site messaging. If the site structure is planned from the start with this in mind, then it will be able to accommodate new campaigns and promotions within the structure itself. If not, you end up with a messy proliferation of micro-sites that don’t tie back into the whole and a corporate site that is misaligned with all other marketing efforts. The messaging needs to be woven into the experience but modular enough to shift as your messaging and brand shifts.

Proctor & Gamble customize its product line landing pages to the right audience groups, and then send users off to the specific brand sites they seek. The overall layouts and features between sections remain similar, but style, tone, and voice shift slightly for the audience.

Microsoft not only offers different sub-sites with varying architectures to accommodate its messaging, it also provides thumbnails of each of them to the user from their main products page. Server customers are very different from Xbox users, so each of those sections has been tailored to that user group. But both stay true to brand and messaging and retain enough global elements to help users see the same company behind both.

Accessorize.
Today�s digital universe goes far beyond the Web site. Users will come to your corporate site for their first and second visits to learn more about the company. But additional information about what�s new can be delivered through a plethora of other digital media. You can provide your users with tools like RSS feeds, email alerts and widgets to track corporate information and product releases.

By creating an overall experience that quickly and cleanly differentiates the corporation and its brand expression, and then driving smaller slices of users to the right place in the cosmos of your Web offerings, you can maximize the effectiveness of how you market online.

By Jason Levin, Elliott Trice, and Mary-Lynne Williams