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Trends and lessons

Regional evolutions and the rise of multimedia

It is hard to divine patterns in the Index based on industry – that Coca-Cola has one of the best sites and PepsiCo one of the worst is evidence of that. But, as last year, there are strong regional themes, with subtle developments since the 2007 ranking.

The big story is still that European companies have the best websites. They take eight of the 10 top positions: all are companies that decided a few years ago to take the web seriously and are now offering an excellent service which they are constantly refining. Within Europe a newcomer, Unicredito Italiano, is following ENI in proving that Italians – relatively new to the web – can play leapfrog over their northern neighbours.

But there are signs that US companies are stirring. More than half of them have made significant changes in the past year, considerably more than those from other regions. ExxonMobil and Pfizer have both jumped from stodgy and old-fashioned outfits into smart new clothing – they have a way to go in beefing up their content, but the structure and messaging are now good. Others have started to move but have a long road to travel; AIG, for example, has sorted its US site, but not the rest.

Too many US sites still suffer from poor governance (how they are run), which leads to a strange mix of good content and terrible functionality: Verizon Communications is in the top pack in the investor and media metrics, but is worst bar none on construction; Google should know better than to let its decentralised philosophy play havoc with its web presence. While the site (we looked mainly at the ‘About Google’ areas) scores well because the content is generally excellent, it is seriously uncoordinated.

Why is Coca-Cola so much better than PepsiCo? Because Coke sees its corporate website as part of its overall brandbuilding effort, while Pepsi uses it primarily to talk to investors, and does so with no great skill.

There are patchy signs of movement in the rest of the world, too, though for now the Chinese and Russians are packing at the bottom of the table. They look and behave like sites from the past. That will doubtless change, at least for the Chinese. Bottom-placed China Mobile Ltd, a Hong Kong quoted company, has a deeply unimpressive site, but its majority shareholder, China Mobile Communications Corp (state-owned and therefore not in the list) has just launched a site (chinamobile.com) that stands up well to western rivals. If that is the start of a trend, expect significant moves.

As last year, it is the Japanese who disappoint. Only Canon’s site has had a significant makeover. Honda’s international site is shown up by its US subsidiary, which also owns the ‘dot com’ address, while the banking sites are all a bit of a mess.

Lessons from the Index

Video and multimedia, mostly Flash driven, are making a big impact

Siemens has superimposed an all-singing multimedia home page on its site – it changes every month or so and is a sophisticated way for the scandal-shaken giant to express its technological prowess. Several companies now use a video on their home pages – it makes sense with broadband, as long as modem-driven users get a decent alternative.

Multimedia is part of a move to make websites more interesting, fun even

Chevron pulls you in to play Energyville, a game to bring power to an imaginary city, while Petrobras has a game where “Ort finds himself surrounded by unbalanced environments”. A rare touch of flair from Japanese sites is the Web Banking College, a virtual world with games, in the local-language version of Sumitomo Mitsui’s careers area.

Developments under the label ‘web 2.0’ are hard to spot, though many are happening away from the corporate site

What we are seeing is the use of blogs to provide a chatty alternative to formal content. Most are found on IT sites and in careers areas, though Wal-Mart’s frank Check Out, a blog by its buyers, is an intriguing sign of openness.

Relaunching can make things worse

General Electric has fallen back partly because its home page is less well managed than it was, but mainly because it has a new navigation system that has been launched without enough attention to detail. Sites need to be debugged, but not just technically.

Hard graft pays off

The top-ranking sites built a solid platform some time ago and are busy polishing it. Siemens has added a fancy new home page, but has otherwise left a solid and rational web presence intact. Shell has concentrated on bringing a great estate of country and business sites into a smoothly coordinated whole. Likewise, Unilever has been rolling out carefully localised country sites for the past two years. It has finished now, as can be seen by comparing, for example Ghana (unileverghana.com) with Ukraine (unilever.ua).

Handle technology with discretion

Be cautious about using a ‘sniffer’ to guess where visitors are from their IP addresses. AIG does this, with the result that Americans get a smart home page but everyone else gets the old, terrible, one. Better to have an international page all can appreciate, and let people choose where to go from there.

One window needn’t fit all

Several sites have recently adopted a ‘one window’ policy – click a link and the new page always opens in the current window. It makes little usability sense and is not an accessibility issue. As long as clear warnings are given to screen readers, “multiple windows don’t cause accessibility problems”, says Julie Howell of Fortune Cookie, formerly web expert at the UK’s Royal National Institute of Blind People.

Whether your company features in the Index or not you can order your own Index report.