Building a good Corporate Website

So, who has built a corporate site that works well? Well this should be assessed from the different perspectives of each of your users.

Its recommended when looking to re-do your company's corporate web offering, that you investigate the different information needs of these different users (applying the appropriate weighting based upon what you do and what you can maintain online). Typical example users are: Back in March 2007, FT.com commissioned an investigation into which companies provided the best corporate website: The results make for interesting reading and show best-practice in communicating with the different audiences you have.

The table of results is from the Bowen Craggs index: http://media.ft.com/cms/1de78660-dc91-11db-a21d-000b5df10621,dwp_uuid=4dce8136-4a24-11da-b8b1-0000779e2340.pdf

Note: A low value (3 out of 12) was given to Wells Fargo’s ‘Contact’ – measuring the efficiency of the points of contact, and also the effective diversion of contacts through FAQs. This will hopefully now improve, given their outward methods of communication using Social Media and Web2.0 technologies more recently.

Using a user-centred approach to content-rich sites should help you create a web offering that matches to the information needs of your targeted audience and help your communicate that much better. It will also help in what is referred to by David Bowen as ‘Construction’, that looks at navigation and coherence of the overall site.

'Benefitting the Financial Services Customer with Web2.0'

My company 'Ideal Interface' has been working on providing insight into on how Financial Services can benefit their customers with Web2.0. This work has resulted in us producing a white paper in the form of an Executive-level presentation.

This is uploaded here:
http://www.slideshare.net/haydens30/fs-web2-v2/
[comments welcome please]

When putting together the research for this piece of work, its been interesting to see the different ways in which those in the FS space are embracing Web2.0 (and which specific parts). What has become most obvious is that no two companies are approaching this in the same way and that certain companies are leading the way in their extended conversation with the customer.
Wells Fargo seems significantly further than most, for example it has 4 blogs that post regularly:
http://blog.wellsfargo.com/
I've also been listening to First Direct's podcasts as a result:
http://www.interactive.firstdirect.com/podcast.html