Siemens: Enlivening a corporate site

Siemens breaks several contemporary conventions with its home page.

The Site

Siemens, the German engineering giant, has a busy home page that is laid out like an online magazine. It carries introductions to a number of ‘stories’, with links that generate new windows containing product or other information.

The current lead story is headed “The speed of the future”, and triggers a Transportation Systems site covering high-speed trains. The windows are rather smaller than the home page, which remains partially visible behind. The home page also has links leading to functional areas such as Jobs and Investor Relations, a dropdown box taking visitors to country sites, a link to a group website index and a current stock price.

The Takeaway

Siemens breaks several rules – or at least current conventions – with its home page. It does not fit on one screen, it is heavy on text, it has a somewhat chaotic feel. Yet it works because it is interesting, and is backed by consistent and carefully thought-out navigation.

Most company home pages are driven by a need to give equal space in the sun to each department – typically they will consist mainly of links, perhaps with the latest news releases highlighted. Siemens thinks more like a newspaper: what will draw people in most effectively? It is, in other words, customer-driven. The use of smaller windows to display further content is an intelligent way of keeping visitors in touch with the home page. The other features, while not as neatly placed as on many sites, are conventional and intuitive: the link to the website index is an obvious but useful feature that few large companies think to provide.

First published on 13 March, 2004