By David Strom
(appeared in Datamation, 3/97)
What makes some web sites better than others? Is it the technology they employ to deliver dynamic and non-textual information? Or does their use of navigation aids as part of their overall site design have a place? Is it the ability to do free-text search or the way the site has aggregated its content?
Unlike the physical world, there is no simple recipe for how to build a better web site. Indeed, many of the best sites in the automotive, financial, and manufacturing industries mix together bits and pieces from several areas, including content, graphic design, and information delivery.
The best sites serve one or more purposes: they inform visitors, and provide access to information that would be difficult or impossible to obtain via paper or other media. They aid existing corporate customers, either by providing customer service or support in ways again that would be difficult or expensive to obtain otherwise. And they build communities of interest, connecting people together that otherwise might not know about each other.
While sites that make use of flash and sizzle get lots of media attention, they don't necessarily have any depth to satisfy a return visit or provide a lasting impression. And, the more complex the technology used, the more trouble it will be for viewers. This is especially true for those using early-model browsers or on slow connections.
The best sites don't always use technologies such as streaming video and audio. Some of the best web sites didn't necessarily use any fancy add-ons or require any special plug-ins - they put together solid information coherently organized simply and intuitively. Finally, some sites served up their content directly from databases that assembled the pages on the fly, matching the content with the interest of the viewer.
Let's take a look at some of the winners and losers.
A good example of poor use of interactive video technologies can be found at www.lecol.com and www.braasco.com. Lecol Ltd. makes road safety products, while Braas Co. is an industrial parts distributor. Both have included VDO.net's video players into their pages. While these two efforts are noteworthy in that they have visual demonstrations of the products that both companies sell, the videos are too small, too fuzzy, and play way too long (some for several minutes) to be of much use. The pages may be initially interesting but won't bring repeat visitors.
An alternative strategy for manufacturing industries is to improve access to information. This includes how information from a corporate database can be displayed on a web page, and how easy or hard it is for visitors to the site to find the specific data of interest. Much of this data access technology happens behind the scenes and without the need for external viewers or plug-ins. The best implementations don't require visitors to do anything different, apart from perhaps registering and authenticating their identity.
Our winning site is by AMP Inc. at www.amp.com. AMP makes thousands of different kinds of connectors, cabling, and other electronic parts for a wide variety of businesses, personal, and commercial uses. Given this breadth, you would think searching their catalog on-line would be a time-consuming process, but they have made it easier by beefing up the ways you can search for their products.
Indeed, there are four different search paths used on the AMP web site: the first is for people who know what part they are looking for by name. The second path, called "picture search," is for those who don't remember the name of a product or who want to look at photographs of the items. Third, you can examine particular product families and narrow down your interests that way. And finally, you can search by part numbers.
That is a lot of different ways to get access to their catalog, and given that the printed version is the size of a thick phone book, this is really the best way to present this information on-line. The search forms are clear, clean, and uncluttered. If you are looking for part numbers and want to switch to part names, it is easy mouse click away.
AMP implemented its online catalog using a search technology from Saqqara Systems, Inc. at www.saqqara.com/products. Called Step Search, it runs on a Unix/Oracle database server. This product prepares a series of web-based forms to make it easier to search large databases. The user doesn't see anything apart from the search forms, which then provide links to the product database.
The AMP site requires registration, but doesn't charge any fee. This brings up another point: don't restrict access unless you provide value. AMP's registration does this, and isn't an obstacle, unlike some sites that require registration just to track visitors. The registration is primarily used to present the catalog to you in the language of your choice as well as the list of parts that is available in your particular country. Many businesses forget that the first part of the web is world-wide, and AMP has different versions of their catalog in French, Italian, Japanese, Chinese, Korean, and German.
Another manufacturing site worth looking at is the Calistoga Mineral Water Co. at www.calistogawater.com. They also use database technology to their advantage, putting such things as customer account information and product ordering into a series of web forms. Many of the pages on their site are assembled on-the-fly from a database of Cold Fusion (www.allaire.comwww.allaire.com) forms, and there are multimedia applications based on Java as well. Like Step Search, Cold Fusion marries an existing database (in this case, the database of products and customers of Calistoga) to a series of web-based forms and queries.
The site serves several purposes. First, the site provides a closer relationship to its existing customers by being able to get up-to-the-minute account activity. You can view account balance, change your monthly beverage orders and see prior payments once you enter your customer ID and a password. Next, the site helps attract new customers by being able to search and see if home or office delivery of its products is available in a particular city. You merely have to enter your zip code on a web form. Finally, the site helps to inform people about the range of potential products available from the company, including mineral waters, coffees and teas, among other beverage lines.
The automotive-related web sites offer a good illustration of how just using a particular technology isn't enough -- you have to implement it appropriately and intelligently.
Let's go back to video animation technologies as an example. There are several different technologies that will allow a visitor to view a video presentation inside a web page. But nothing turns visitors off more than pages that don't work properly, and webmasters need to ensure that their implementation of video is flawless. Unfortunately, we had all sorts of problems with the Honda site when we visited the site last in mid February. Honda has a series of QuickTime videos that either didn't load or had broken links.
If you take a look at www.bmwusa.com, BMW's web site, you'll see a few cheesy MacroMedia Shockwave videos (www.macromedia.com) that offer small and not well-defined pictures of the interior of their cars. The photos have hot-spots that you can click on to beep the horn, turn the radio display on and off, and switch from daytime to night-time views. All in all, a very unsatisfying situation and not one that will encourage a consumer to go out and spend upwards of $30,000 on a new BMW. Shockwave will require you to download a viewer or plug-in for your browser, on a variety of Windows, Macintosh operating systems.
Now look at Saab' site at www.saabusa.com. They have implemented a technology called PhotoBubbles from Omniview (www.omniview.com). These photos have lots more resolution, and you have a full 360-degree view of the interior of the vehicle. You can pan, turn around or look up and down, and zoom in to examine various features. You don't have the ability to click on various hot spots on the photo, but at least with this technology you can get a better feel for what the interior furnishings and appointments are all about.
PhotoBubbles are prepared by taking several images with a fish-eye ultra-wide angle lens or special equipment rented or sold by Omniview, and are rather costly -- each bubble will cost anywhere from $500 to several thousands. You'll also need to download a special viewer application or plug-in for your browser from the company, and these are available for Windows 95, 3.1 and Macintosh operating systems. PhotoBubbles were also implemented at Honda's Japanese site, but since we don't read Japanese we weren't exactly sure how to find them.
Many of the car companies have dealer locator search forms on their web sites: you enter your zip code and you see one (or sometimes more than one) dealer that is closest to your location. The definition of closest can vary considerably: on the Infiniti web site, we had a list of dealers that ranged from the next town over to one that was about 30 miles away. Mazda's site has a car loan calculator, and explains the differences between buying and leasing a car.
But these are just some minor benefits and don't really get to what a car-oriented web site should be. Our winning site though is LandRover's site at www.landrover.com. They have done some solid thinking about how to present information and offer uncluttered screens that are both attractive and informative. For example, there is a choice of two different front doors -- a technology and bandwidth-rich site full of goodies and a "lite" site that doesn't have all the trimmings. The enhanced web site detects the type of operating system you are using and automatically puts you in the right place so you can run the appropriate Windows or Macintosh software.
Unlike the other sites mentioned above, they just don't serve up gratuitous graphics, but offer some real use for the technologies they have used. The LandRover site does a nice job of implementing interactive animations effectively and without a great deal of fuss or fanfare. Here you can outfit your next car with a series of options and view a picture of the results. Clicking on the name of the option on the left-hand side of the screen instantly results in the displayed image of the car color, grille, headlight configuration and other items. This was written in Javascript and may not work for older browsers or particular operating systems.
The number of sites in financial services continues to grow daily and the reason is fairly easy to see: the web can be a place to quickly separate investors from their capital. What makes for a good web site here is solid information that can be easily navigated and yet offer real value to visitors. Let's look at a few sites that have some promise:
The Fund Library (www.fundlib.com) site is a Canadian-based site that tries to build community of investors looking for more information. In addition to providing financial data, they have added RealAudio sound clips from experts and maintain several discussion forums for visitors to leave their comments. The site is noteworthy in that all of its pages are assembled from Cold Fusion-enabled database. This makes it easier to maintain a list of all on-line resources related to mutual funds, for example.
Silicon Investor, at www.techstocks.com, has a great deal of information pulled together, mostly on stocks of the computer and biotech companies. There are trend graphs of past price performance, discussion groups for investors, and profiles on various companies. If you are looking for information on one of the companies covered, there is a great deal of solid information. However, there are many missing companies from its database, and above all the site is hard to navigate around. For example, the corporate profiles of all their biotech companies are listed on a single screen - that can get tedious to return to this screen. Once you get over the initial stock trend charts, there isn't much to really bring you back to the site.
However, Schwab's gigantic eSchwab/OneSource site at www.eschwab.com gets the nod though for the best financial site. This site serves many different needs for mutual fund investors: information, trading, and education. If you want to track the performance on over 600 different funds, you have the tools to do so here. If you want to order a prospectus, it is a quick mouse click away. And there is a nice step-by-step investment planner, including a handy forms-based calculator for estimating what you need to save for college expenses.
What makes eSchwab work is the aggregation of all this content. You don't have to leave the site to purchase a new fund, provided it is on the list of funds that they work with. Even the more skilled can learn something new about investing, something that is pretty obscure for most of us but necessary.
As you can see with our tour of the best and worst web sites, it isn't just the flashy technology that delivers the best sites - often the availability or access to the online information is a better choice. Keep this in mind when building or rebuilding your own webs.
Copyright 1997 Cahners Publishing Co.