This week I spent some quality time in HP.com’s new Large Enterprise Business solutions Website – which is the home for its solutions, services software, and industry marketing. It’s also one of the better sites in the business. Here’s five reasons why.
- Great navigation. The site uses a version of IBM.com’s pull-down global navigation. This puts HP’s enterprise solutions, services, and products into perfect context, then zips visitors to the right location – fast. This navigation is so solid that it’s almost impossible to get lost.
- Fabulous filtering. The Solutions and Services home pages allow visitors to filter offerings by business need, topic, or type of service or solution – plus different combinations of all. Think of it as a perfect way to allow visitors to quickly hone in on the products & services that meet their needs.
- Great resources blocking. Related resources are front and center on the right panel. Concise headlines, clear links, and plenty of courtesy information (i.e. format, file size). Oh, and one other thing. Every page hits all of kinds of content B2B buyers want and need.
- Persistent call to action. The Contact Us module is in the same place, impossible to miss, and includes all of the basic engagement modes. To be a real best-practice contender, however, the enterprise team needs to add call me now and chat options to the list.
- Savvy use of tabs. Lower-level product pages do more than organize resources to avoid information overload. They persistently lead visitors to related products and services. A big thumbs up.
On the other hand . . .
Of course no review would be complete without some lessons to be learned. In this case, it comes in the form of long pages that are stuffed with too much information. Here, there are three lessons to learn.
- Don’t make my eyes cross. Long pages need lots of visual interest (photos, factoids) to break up the story. Without that, it’s just a blizzard of double spaced text.
- Let me nibble. You can’t stuff your old content into a new long format page. Content must be short and sweet – and should lead visitors to more information on another page.
To see the masters at work, surf over to IBM.com’s Smarter Planet site and, of course, Apple.com.
Oh, and one more thing . . .
It looks like HP.com hasn’t really settled on its new home page that got a thumbs up last week. Which brings me to the last lesson to be learned. Avoid publicly A/B testing home pages in a way that makes your site look like a practicing schizophrenic.
So here’s the question. What do you think?
