The Conference Board: Widening its net

An easy way of doubling the links from the home page without doubling the clutter.

The Site

The Conference Board is a not-for-profit management and marketplace research organisation producing independent reports and forecasts for its membership of senior executives.

Its website has a dated design, with one unusual feature. The global navigation bar across the top of each page features six content tabs. There are, however, two quite different sets of these. One, shown when the site if first opened, features services (conferences, councils, publications etc); the other offers topics (including corporate citizenship, corporate governance, economics). An auxiliary tab, highlighted in yellow, allows visitors to switch between the two sets by clicking on it.

The Takeaway

Many organisations have to clutter their pages with navigational links – both to try and connect with visitors’ different needs and because internal groups demand their ‘place in the sun’. Various solutions have been tried, but few are as simple as this.

While the design suggests that this is an elderly site, its lack of sophistication has been turned to advantage by The Conference Board. What easier way of doubling the links without doubling the clutter than by providing a simple low-tech device to switch between two views?

First published on 13 January, 2005