Overall: IBM Global Services
Usability & Effectiveness: IBM Global Services
Content, Features & Capabilities: Accenture.com
The ripples of IBM.com’s latest site redesign reached the professional services segment this year and has rocked Accenture.com’s first place ranking. The question now is whether or not the tide will turn in 2012. Here’s the rundown from first place to last: Read More→
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: Read More→
For the most part, I’d rather have a root canal than use most support Websites.
Search for information and you end up with a list of a bazillion documents with truncated descriptions that read like Sanskrit.
Want to take a different path? Try ferreting your product out of a laundry list of every product the company ever made.
Or try the “follow our logical links” scenario—where you end up drilling to China.
At the end of all of this wonderfulness is the real insult. Support content that either requires an engineering degree to understand—or a wad of general purpose instructions that dance around the problem and miss the issue by a country mile. Read More→
Overall: Oracle.com
Usability & Effectiveness: IBM Software Group
Content, Features & Capabilities: Oracle.com
With two companies performing complete site overhauls–and one nudging its site into place over the past year—rankings were bound to change in 2011. So which sites were the major movers and shakers over the past 12 months? Which ones are the sites to watch through 2012? Here’s the rundown from first place to last: Read More→
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: Read More→
Juniper.net is pursuing an interesting strategy which I suspect most companies have missed. Last year, it did two things.
It launched a completely new Website in February.
Then it executed a wholesale update in October.
That wouldn’t be important, except for one thing. The October refresh was executed across the entire Website. From top to bottom. From stem to stern.
This, as it turns out, introduces a new design strategy into the mix. Until now, most Website teams have taken an incremental improvement approach, limiting updates and innovations to certain areas of their sites. A new home page; revamped product marketing zones; or a new look and feel for the top three layers of a site. The net result is that users have to re-learn the site every time they move between zones.
In contrast, Juniper.net’s approach is iterative. It’s not interested in hitting solid singles. It goes for the home run.
There are a couple of things to remember here. Read More→
This week we started our Q1 evaluations of 23 Websites, plus additional sites selected by our clients for comparison.
We’ve mixed up the siteIQ eBusiness Index for 2010. In some cases the decision was based on eliminating Websites that haven’t improved over the past year and don’t provide any good or best practices worth tracking. In other cases, sites have fallen off our list because they don’t exist anymore. That would be EDS.com which was integrated into HP.com — and Sun.com which went off the airwaves last week.
In both cases, these sites are a loss to anyone who cares about good and great practices. Don’t bother to follow them to their new homes. Their presence inside of their new parent’s sites is nothing to write home about.
Here’s some more about the new sites added to our roster – and why we’re singing “auld lang syne” to others. (If you are a siteIQ client you can read more about what we expect from these and other leading sites in 2010 in our new executive brief in the siteIntelligence Research Center). Read More→
We’ve been working on client reports this week, and I had a chance to look at some interesting graphs that map out how leading Websites have performed against our benchmarks over time. Among other things, these graphs show us where Web teams are focusing their efforts and are changing (or trying to change) the rules of the game. They are also a very useful early warning system that allows us to pinpoint important industry trends and where companies are focusing their Website investments.
But this time one graph stopped me in my tracks. Rather than displaying the undulating trends we normally see, this company’s graph looks like an EKG readout. Scores peak as new capabilities are added, decline when they are pulled, and then flat line for 6 months or more. The overall impression is a site that can’t seem to find its strategic way — or its operating mojo for that matter.
We recently put the finishing touches on our research project to identify how effectively leading IT companies address language requirements on 700+ global Websites operating in 232 countries around the globe. The companies under our microscope include the Who’s Who in enterprise systems (IBM, HP, Dell and Sun), enterprise software (SAP and Oracle), and the networking industry (Cisco and Nortel Networks). Quite frankly, we would have loved to add other major players, such as Microsoft, CA, Symantec, Adobe and others, but at 700 Websites we had our hands full.
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.
Ever since we made the decision to add reseller sites to our eBusiness Index roster for 2008, I’ve been curious to see how they would perform against some of the IT industry’s selling powerhouses, including HP.com, Dell.com, and IBM.com. I wasn’t curious about their competitive performance, per se. Reseller sites are significantly smaller than their enterprise-class counterparts, even though they sell many of the same products. That automatically means their overall rankings will be lower. What I was curious about is how well these reseller sites would stack up based on their usability.
Insight.com and Newegg.com both receive scores that place them in a league with IT industry leaders — and well ahead of one of their major partners — HP.
When I rolled up the first quarter 2008 usability numbers this week, a couple of interesting facts jumped out. First, Newegg.com’s product marketing score is nearly 71%, which puts it on par with the eBusiness Index average (71.38%) — and places it in close proximity to enterprise systems heavyweights in the effectiveness rankings. Second, and more important, all three reseller sites — Newegg.com, CDW.com, and Insight.com — earn e-selling-related usability scores that are well above the eBusiness Index average, and actually rival those of the ultimate online channel — Dell.com.
Admittedly, these are two bright spots in an otherwise checkered usability landscape for these companies. Read More→
