The annual siteIQ eBusiness rankings just hit the airwaves. This year’s report is a whopper. 95 pages, 108 graphs – and our usual politically incorrect take on what it all means.

Here’s how some of the 2011 rankings shake out.

Overall Performance.  IBM.com and Cisco.com share the winner’s podium.

2011 was the year that IBM.com transformed itself from a large, aging duckling into a swan to be reckoned with (at least above the water line). There’s been many a late night for the IBM.com team—and the “wow” factor inherent in its new design has gone a long way toward keeping it in the top slot this year.

It’s been many a moon since Cisco.com had its overnight makeover—but this team’s intrepid iterative design strategy keeps this site fresh and innovative season after season. Cisco.com has building a better mousetrap down to a science—and that’s why it bumped IBM.com over and shares the #1 spotlight this year.

Usability & Effectiveness | The best hold their own

It’s no surprise that the overall winners—IBM.com and Cisco.com—also aced the usability & effectiveness tests. Both teams have been busy performing some pretty substantial site facelifts over the past year—and their high wire acts paid some nice dividends.

CA.com, IBM Software Group and Symantec.com complete the top five usability roster. CA.com held its own (third place), IBM Software jumped into fourth (from 6^th), and Symantec.com — last year’s usability darling — slipped from third to fifth.

Symantec.com’s fall from grace sounds like bad news for the team, but it’s actually a bit of high praise. After all, most of the Symantec.com site hasn’t really changed much over the past 36 months. That’s a virtual lifetime in Internet years. Staying in the top five is a testament to all of the hard work that went into this site’s base design and architecture. But times are changing—and it will be interesting to see if Symantec.com can keep up.

Content, features & capabilities | The same dance continues and Dell finally gets its bragging rights.

Mirror, mirror on the wall. Which is the biggest Website of all? Once the mist in the mirror clears, you’ll be looking at HP.com. In fact, this year, HP.com succeeded in getting the top spot all to itself by bumping off its long-standing 80 pound rival gorilla IBM.com. If you squint real hard in the mirror, you’ll see Cisco.com quietly making the donuts in third place.

While IBM, HP, and Cisco executed their complex kabuki dances, Dell.com was busy thumping some other sites down the Index. This year, it took the top spot in the online support category after watching HP and IBM toss the winner’s baton back and forth. We’ve always challenged Dell.com’s self-proclaimed assertion that its support was the biggest & best in the business. Now it’s (partially) true.

Subscribers can pick it up in the Library right now. If you’re not a subscriber you can pick up a copy from the site here.

Subscribers Login Here. Non-subscribers can learn more about The Library here.

Overall: Symantec.com
Usability & Effectiveness: Symantec.com
Content, Features & Capabilities: Microsoft.com

Each business software site’s redesign over the past year has caused content and features to shrink on a huge scale. But did these diets help the sites’ usability scores? At least one Website should think so.  Here’s the rundown from first place to last:

1. Any Web team that focuses on site usability should put Symantec.com at the top of its watch list. This site’s usability ranking not only debuted at number 2 on the siteIQ Enterprise Software Index, but held its number 1 position in usability while stealing first place in overall performance from Microsoft.com in the siteIQ Business Software Index. Not bad for a year’s work.
2. Microsoft.com’s site reductions during its rolling redesign took a toll on its performance this year. It is still the ten-ton gorilla in the business software segment, but its third place usability ranking is pure monkey business.
3. Adobe.com’s story is similar to Microsoft.com’s. It is the smallest of the business software sites reviewed—and it got smaller over the course of the year. But unlike Microsoft.com, Adobe.com brings in relatively admirable usability scores. Unfortunately, it wasn’t enough to reach any of the brass rings in 2011.

There’s plenty more rankings & ratings – and our take on the evaluation results – in our new Business Software Report.  Subscribers can pick up a copy in the Library. If you aren’t a subscriber you can learn more here…..

Subscribers Login Here.
Non-subscribers can learn more about The Library here.

Overall: Cisco.com
Usability & Effectiveness: Cisco.com
Content, Features & Capabilities: Cisco.com

Site refreshes, redesigns, and company acquisitions. All were in play in the networking systems segment last year. Did these facelifts improve these site’s usability? Did HP’s acquisition of 3Com give the old ProCurve site a new lease on life? Here’s the rundown from first place to last:

1. It is no surprise that networking giant and usability muse Cisco.com swept the Index awards. The site has been undergoing an iterative refresh over the past year. What is surprising is how the slight changes improved Cisco.com’s performance enough to award them 12 first place rankings—just in usability alone. Congrats Cisco.com!
2. HP Networking’s inclusion on the siteIQ Index this year upset every site’s apple cart—and stole second place from Juniper.net. But did HP Networking really get second place all on its own? Let’s just say it is nice to be part of the HP.com family.
3. The site that took the greatest hit this year was Juniper.net. Despite a sweeping Website redesign (one well worth checking out), the site lost its second place position (in all major categories) and its changes failed to move its usability scores one whit. But it wasn’t all bad news for Juniper.net. Its work exposed Juniper.net as a major player in online communities—including a first place ranking for Corporate Blogs.
4. Brocade.com gets the sleeper of the year award for stealing second place in overall usability from Juniper.net. Like Juniper.net, Brocade.com has been making changes to its site too. The difference is that all its latest updates actually moved the usability ball down the field. But Brocade.com hardly has time to rest on its laurels if it is going to bump Juniper.net out of third place overall.

There’s plenty more rankings & ratings – and our take on the evaluation results – in our new Networking Systems Report. Subscribers can pick up a copy in the Library. If you aren’t a subscriber you can learn more here…..

Subscribers Login Here.

Non-subscribers can learn more about The Library here.

Overall: IBM.com
Usability: IBM.com
Content, Features & Capabilities: HP.com

But the siteIQ eBusiness Index is always about more than just rankings, ratings, and numbers. So what’s the story about what happened over the past 12 months? Here’s the rundown from first place to last:

1. IBM.com lost sole ownership of its first place position–and with that some bragging rights. Although they added another “Best Practice” rating under their belt, they lost three “Good Practice” ratings due to HP.com’s massive site footprint—which only got larger over the past year. Nevertheless, IBM.com still holds its own—albeit by a margin that is half of what it used to be.
2. Believe it or not, HP.com has a lot to crow about. It garnered a first place ranking for Content, Features & Capabilities, making it the most robust enterprise systems site on the siteIQ Index. It also added another “Best Practice” rating in eCommerce, bringing its total up from two to three. However these accolades can’t hide a dismal ranking in site usability, which just happens to be what really counts this year. Just goes to show, just because your site is big doesn’t mean its usable.
3. Not surprisingly, Dell.com spent the last 12 months focused on core marketing and selling requirements: product marketing, online communities, call to action, and eCommerce. This has always been its tactical modus operandi. Overall improvements in corporate marketing areas are also evident—the most notable being a massive increase in its investor relations.
4. Oracle.com added site content and features across every area of the site—except support. Meanwhile usability scores stayed flat. However, the scoring trend shows that Oracle.com tends to do a more with less. In general, areas that had fewer content additions showed stronger usability scores than zones that went through major overhauls.
5. EMC.com’s story of the past year is largely one of treading water. With the exception of its tanking online support scores, all other areas received minor investments in content and features that resulted in minor upticks in its usability scores. Corporate and product marketing areas got the most attention. Corporate blogs made the biggest splash—from being a no-show in 2010 to a score of almost 60% in 2011.
6. In the past 12 months Intel.com introduced the barest glimmer of an eCommerce facility and corporate blogs area. These two additions alone are responsible for virtually all of Intel.com’s scoring increases over the past year. Most other categories registered less than 1% change in content or usability scoring. (1)

To get all the gritty details–star ratings, competitive rankings, and detailed scoring–by category, by Website, and overall–click here to buy the report.

(1) At the time of this post, Intel.com introduced a new Website that had not been launched before the siteIQ eBusiness Index Enterprise Systems evaluations. siteIQ Best Practice Case Studies detailing the Intel.com redesign launch will be available in the Best Practice Case Study Library.

Subscribers Login Here.
Non-subscribers can learn more about The Library here.

The good news is that everyone can learn from the steps and mis-steps of these leading IT vendors.

siteIQ clients have access to our study results in a new siteIQ SnapShot report, Global Websites | Key Metrics | Language Compliance. For those who don’t have access to the siteIntelligence Research Center, I thought I’d share some of the more interesting things we learned.

The Big Picture

The IT industry has come a long way since we last looked at the global landscape in 2005. Then, language compliance in key markets, such as Latin America and Asia Pacific, were hit and miss at best. Today, these regions stand out as having some of the strongest language compliant Websites. Among the companies studied, Dell’s Latin American regional sites are the venues to watch.

In a reprise of our 2005 results, Oracle retains the crown as the worst global language performer.

On the other end of the spectrum, the emerging market du jour – Eastern Europe – is a language compliance disaster. Here, companies are following a number of less-than-effective strategies.

Those that deliver sites in Russian appear to be unaware that this language is spoken in less than half of the 29 countries in this region. Others, like Oracle, fall back on English-based Websites in a region where English is not a first, second or an official language. None of the companies we studied “get it”, but if you want to see the best of a bad lot, spend some time observing Eastern European sites operated by IBM.

Among the companies we studied, Dell, IBM, and Cisco stand out as good-to-excellent performers across the globe.

• Dell achieves this distinction by having a massive global footprint (sites in 166 countries), an intricate and highly effective regional schemas – and also pads its overall score by having the best Latin America performance across the board.

• IBM, with sites in 98 countries, is actually the provisional leader in our minds, due to a strategy that delivers content (at minimum) in the target language at the top four levels of sites. IBM also gets our vote for leadership because it is the only vendor in our group that operates zero (yes, zero) sites that are not language compliant.

• Cisco (75 sites) also gets our ‘good housekeeping’ seal of approval by pursuing a strategy that, on average, delivers either perfect language compliance or compliance at the top four levels.

In a reprise of our 2005 results, Oracle retains the crown as the worst global language performer. Over a third of Oracle’s sites are not language compliant and it appears that the company has never seen an English-based global Website it didn’t like. If you want to see language ‘bait and switch’ in action, Oracle is the company to watch.

The Method to the Madness

When all of the scores were tallied, we found that four distinct global language strategies are in play around the globe.

The most effective is the “Almost Perfect” strategy executed by sites that deliver virtually all content (except support) in one of the country’s top three prime or official languages (as determined by data provided by the CIA FactBook).  Although the random piece of content may be delivered in English, these sites clearly focus on delivering most marketing, channel, corporate, and promotional information to visitors in their lingua franca. Just over half (51.3%) of the sites we studied fall into this category—but when you factor out English-speaking countries, this drops to 22.8% of non-English speaking sites. In other words, relatively few companies operate perfect, non-English-based global sites.

The next effective is the “Largely Compliant” strategy which is observed on 14.8% of the sites. These sites deliver the vast majority of content in the country language, but rely on US or English-based content up to 20% of the time (we would have preferred 10% but 20% ended up as the logical break point). Of the 700+ sites reviewed, only 14.8% were deemed to be following a ‘Largely Compliant” strategy.  The company that relies most on this strategy is Cisco (48 sites or 64% of its total global footprint).

When you get to product detail, however, you are on your own unless you speak English. Of the sites reviewed, about a fifth (19.6%) fall into the “top four levels” category.

We dubbed the next strategy the “Top Four Levels” gambit, which reflects that these sites tend to deliver the top four levels of the site in the target language, and then link visitors to the company’s U.S. site content at lower levels. Typically, these top four levels consist of a language-compliant home page and features, reseller and channel information, product gateway pages, press releases and promotions and occasionally, top level product pages. When you get to product detail, however, you are on your own unless you speak English. Of the sites reviewed, about a fifth (19.6%) fall into the “top four levels” category. Here, SAP is most likely to pursue this strategy (53.1%), followed by IBM (33.7% of all sites).

Finally, we have the least effective strategy across the globe—the “Non-Compliant or Bait and Switch” strategy. These sites give every IT vendor a bad name (to put it mildly). They either deliver language compliant home page links that lead to English content—or don’t even try to deliver a site in the country’s target language. (This, of course, begs the question: if they don’t speak English, what’s the point?) The good news is that only 14.2% of global sites we studied exhibit this egregious behavior. Among the companies we studied, Oracle gets the prize (35.9% of sites) and Sun Microsystems gets an honorable mention.

Words to the Wise

Even the best funded Website teams struggle . . . what should the less well-heeled do?

When all of the numbers are tallied up, it’s obvious that even the best funded IT vendors (note: the companies we studied spend well over $2 billion annually on their Website operations) struggle to deliver perfect global language behaviors. Given that, what should the less well-heeled do?

• Avoid List Envy. Ignore where your competitors (or leading IT companies) are operating global Websites. Just because a company has a footprint in a country doesn’t mean it operates an effective Website. To avoid playing follow the loser, map your global Website strategy to your own channel strategy—and then prioritize countries based on their IT spending, the number of Internet users in each country, and  the country’s real language requirements. If you can’t support the site in the user’s local language, put this country at the bottom of your list.

• Think Regional. Some of the best performers build their excellence on well-crafted regional language sites. Dell’s Latin American sites—which are built around country-specific home pages backed by a Spanish-based regional site—is a classic example of a regional schema that works. Regions that are prime for regional language designs are Latin America, the Caribbean and about 10 countries in Eastern Europe.

What do you think of the global Websites operated by IT companies? Sound off in comments.