After what feels like an eon of monastic spending, 2011 was a year of grander budgets & projects — and at least 14 site redesigns and launches. Here’s how some of the money was spent.

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Quotable Quotes

• About Dell’s e-commerce

  “Dell.com has been the industry’s eCommerce darling since the mid-90s—and nothing changed in 2011. Today, however, Dell.com has stiff competition from Symantec.com in the business software industry and Newegg.com, which leads all comers among the reseller set. Adobe.com and Oracle.com round out the top five, and complete the set of Good Practice performers.”

• Symantec’s ‘thank you’ note to Norton

  “Overall, Symantec.com’s services marketing usability performance wipes everyone else off the map with a whopping 77% score. This is thanks, in large part, to best-practice-class B2C services marketing found on the Norton site. “

• Getting from here to there

  “When it comes to getting from here to there, the networking systems sites deliver the most logical and efficient paths. Enterprise software sites get a half-hearted honorable mention. Not surprisingly, smaller sites do it better—but there are also lessons to learn from big sites. Cisco.com, CA.com, and IBM Software Group do the best jobs of simplifying complex click streams.”

• Cisco.com’s banner year

  “2011 was a banner year for Cisco.com’s support zone. An updated home page; a mega-menu mega-optimized towards real user behaviors—plus a nice design refresh to boot. It’s no surprise that Cisco.com retained its first place position. But that position is shaky. Symantec.com is hot on its heels and is in a virtual tie for first place. And the IBM.com sites aren’t far behind. This makes online support usability a hot topic to watch in 2012.”

• The search revolution continues

  “Site search is in the throes of a slow motion revolution, and each wave of innovators scramble the rankings. Reseller sites’ powerful “search-to-buy” search engines are “fall-off-a-log” easy to use and, as their #1 ranking attests, the best in the business. However, if search-to-buy isn’t your bag, spend some quality time on Brocade.com and Accenture.com to see the next best user experiences.”