What is top class

The characteristics of an effective corporate web presence

What makes a top-class corporate web presence? First, you can move around easily without losing your bearings. This is a sign both of good construction and good governance – that is, the web presence is run according to well-observed rules and processes.

Second, the best sites do all the jobs they could be doing. They offer a high quality service to all stakeholders: people looking for jobs, customers, journalists, investors and the important social responsibility lobby (see Leaders by metric for more). They even take care to offer good contact points – an element we include separately because it is often the most important role a site plays.

Third, they make good use of web technology. The spread of broadband means video, podcasts and the like make increasing sense, though imaginative use of less bandwidth hungry tools can be at least as valuable. We see limited but growing evidence of social media or ‘web 2.0’ devices to build communities online. This may be because these corporate giants are laggardly or because they are rationally cautious, keeping their fingers cool while waiting for an exploitable model to emerge. Whichever, we would expect to see more experimentation over the coming year including with the latest social phenomenon, Twitter.

Roche, the new index leader, displacing Siemens, and its regents, BP and Nokia, stand out because of the impressive quality they achieve across all areas of their respective web presences. Where others shine in places and stumble elsewhere, the top companies have no significant areas of weakness. While BP and Nokia have achieved this by incremental improvement of an established presence – itself a noteworthy achievement – Roche has done it in a major relaunch of its site. The combination of huge attention to detail and imagination required to pull this off is what truly marks it out.

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