• Daily Blog
• Books
• Video Seminars
• Events
• Library
• Summit
• Workshops
• Consulting
• About Mequoda

• Home
• About
• Contact Us
• Discussion Forum

Contributing Editor
Terri Edmonston

Terri Edmonston is a freelance writer and online marketing consultant focused in the publishing industry. She has worked with both print and online media companies, B2B and B2C, planning marketing strategies, analyzing data and executing campaigns. In addition to writing for the Mequoda Library, Terri also serves as Project Director for the Mequoda Group, LLC, where she has worked on projects for the Asay Media Network and Mother Earth Living.

Reports by Terri Edmonston

Babycenter.com Membership Website Review


ConsumerReports.org Membership Website Review


CooksIllustrated.com Membership Website Review


Morningstar.com Membership Website Review


WSJ.com Membership Website Review


Forbes.com Website Design Review
With Advertisers Footing the Bill, Forbes.com has Built a Website Offering a Superior—and Free—Online Content Experience for Users.

Forbes.com is part of (do I really need to say this?) the Forbes family publishing business. Including the familiar Forbes magazine, the websites Forbes.com and ForbesAutos.com, spin-off magazines such as ForbesLife, business and investing specialty newsletters, a business conference division and Forbes on Fox TV. This is a typical Mequoda publishing pyramid—with a very rich family sitting on top.

Well the family hasn't let the money get to their heads, Forbes.com is a commendable site from a design and usability perspective. With 15 million unique visitors worldwide, Forbes.com is an exceptional example of how providing first-rate free content turns the site into "must-buy media."

The site passes the Mequoda Website Design scorecard with enough As to make it to the top of the Mequoda 400 list—if there was one (not a bad idea). Unsurprising were the top grades in strategic intent and brand preference for the prominent business magazine. The criteria that upped the ante were the As earned in content webification and relationship building and readability. With advertisers footing the bill, Forbes.com has built a website offering a superior—and free—online content experience for users.

• Read the laundry list of content webification tactics that make Forbes.com such a sticky site - page 9
• Discover the strategy Forbes.com uses to aggressively invite visitors to start a relationship - page 11
• Learn how Forbes.com keeps their navigation persistent despite the deep layers of content, multiple topics and content formats - page 13
• Understand how Forbes.com completely eliminated the usual print/online problem faced by many magazine publishers - page 24
• Discover how Forbes.com achieves the one takeaway that so many online publishers wish they could do - page 25

Discover.com Website Design Review
The Site that Earned a Top Score in 2004 Hasn't Lost Too Much Ground. The Lesson Here is Simply a Wake-Up Call—for Online Publishers, Continuous Improvement is a Requirement Just to Keep Up.

Readers familiar with Mequoda as Internet Media Review (IMR), might remember that Discover.com was given the number one Best Practice Ranking for Consumer Magazine Website Design. Since that time, a lot has changed—for Discover.com, for the Mequoda website design scorecard and for magazine websites.

The changes: Discover.com was bought from parent Disney by Bob Guccione Jr. at the end of 2005; IMR changed its name to Mequoda and has increased the scorecard to include 14 categories instead of the original 10 and finally the drastic improvement of media websites in the last two years has raised the bar for all entrants considerably. At the end of the review, Discover.com has lost a little ground, but not much. This scorecard shows that Discover.com still brings the right strategy to their site, increasing subscriptions and consumer reach.

Bob Guccione Jr. (founder of Spin and Gear) bought Discover and its respected, intelligent science and technology editorial because he wanted to "eradicate the preciousness of the science category." He wanted to make a magazine accessible and interesting to a mass audience. Readability, labeling and language and relationship building are some of the good grades on this scorecard that bear out this argument. But, If he really wants to follow through on his promise to make the magazine site more "exciting and entertaining," Discover.com has some work to do in community building and content webification.

• Discover how they balance their homepage real estate for in-house advertising and external advertising - page 8
• Learn how Discover.com takes advantage of personalization features to build relationships with users - page 10
• Understand why Discover.com is leaving a great opportunity on the table by ignoring this one very viable community building tool - page 12
• Avoid the mistake Discover.com is making in their website navigation - page 14
• Find out what's missing from the Discover.com site that could have users coming back for more everyday - page 21

ConsumerReports.org Website Design Review
With As in Strategic Intent, Relationship Building and Brand Preference, it's Hardly Surprising that this Non-Profit is an Online Leader in the Paid Membership Website Category.

Mequoda has previously published a case study on Consumer Reports, extolling their successful membership website strategy that has earned them over two million online subscribers (as of November, 2005). Averaging well over 20,000 new online subscribers per month, it's obvious this site is doing something right.

The site started with a clear product position—a valuable information resource that could not accept advertising. That led to only one choice in strategy: a paid membership website offering large archives of information.

• The print product would still present long, in-depth articles on, say, reducing energy costs and the products that would help, while the Web would be sold as a research product.
• Members could look through years of reviews to find the exact product and model they were interested in.
• The differences between the print and online product made sense, both to the business and to the end consumer.
• Even as a paid membership site, CR has some free content.
• The hardest design question has always been how to make it immediately visually obvious what is free and what is paid content on the site.

CooksIllustrated.com Website Design Review
CooksIllustrated.com has Earned High Marks in Relationship Building and Readability. Other Areas Such as Community Building Display a Good Infrastructure that Could Really be Impressive with a Little More Promotion.

Mequoda has previously covered the Boston Common Press's media network in America's Test Kitchen Media Network Case Study by Jane E. Zarem. The membership website (and print magazine) Cook's Illustrated is an important part of the business strategy. Here we'll review the design and usability of the membership website CooksIllustrated.com. With 120,000 paid online subscribers, this site's recipe is worth a try.

Just to re-cap, the media network integrates content across all their outlets. Thus the TV show will use a recipe from the magazine, etc. ... The pyramid includes:

• America's Test Kitchen TV show andwebsite
• Cook's Illustrated magazine and website
• Cook's Country Magazine and website
• Online bookstore with 40 titles of cookbooks and DVDs

The company sees itself as a database business—they seek to gather a database of names with a specific set of interests for further marketing efforts. The target audience is comprised of educated home cooks and smart shoppers who want to know that they're cooking the best recipes with the best tools. This group isn't satisfied with any old brownie mix, they want to know the best brownie recipe—with scientific proof! How do they do it? The content is cooked up—literally—in Boston where "a team of highly qualified test cooks and editors perform thousands of tests every year... to develop the best recipes and cooking techniques, recommend the best cookware and equipment and rate brand-name pantry staples for home cooks."

This Mequoda Website Scorecard review shows some excellent scores in readability and relationship building. On a membership website, this is exactly where we'd expect to see good scores. The audience won't pay for something that's hard to read. And the site won't get a paying audience without paying attention to getting email addresses and subscriptions—building the relationship—from the get-go. The areas that are weak are also not unexpected—for example content that comes from a bi-monthly magazine often fails to figure out how to re-slice itself to fit a website's daily schedule—content freshness is not a strong suit here.

MarthaStewart.com Website Design Review
MarthaStewart.com Stands Out for Integration of TV and Magazine Content Online, but Otherwise the Site is Doing Poorly on Some Key Usability Guidelines.

You almost can't have a dinner party without someone making a "Martha Stewart" comment at some point during the evening. Beyond being a mere household name, Martha Stewart has become synonymous with home decorating, cooking and gardening—bringing beauty to all things domestic. Martha Stewart Living Omnimedia, Inc (MSLO), is an integrated media company distributing the "art of everyday living" to us in many different channels, broken down into business segments:

• Publishing - Magazines (Martha Stewart Living, Martha Stewart Weddings, Everyday Food, Body + Soul, etc..), Books, DVDs and syndicated newspaper columns
• Broadcasting - MARTHA on the Style Network, Everyday Food on PBS, Martha Stewart Radio on Sirius, etc…
• Merchandising - Home and garden products, Signature paint colors etc...
• Internet/eCommerce - websites sell advertising against content, also direct sales through the Martha Stewart Store and Martha Stewart Flowers

All these channels circle and promote each other, as Martha talks about her paint color used in the kitchen on her show, advertisers buy across the media outlets, content can be re-purposed in books and DVDs, and so on.

Looking at it from this point of view, the usability of the site MarthaStewart.com has a potentially big impact on the other business segments, so how does the website do against the Mequoda Scorecard?

• Great online video and content integration
• Weak usability in navigation and affordance
• Simplistic community tools

The video segments are hands-down the most impressive part of the site. From the first page, visitors can't help but be sucked in to watching some MARTHA segments on the streaming video. The low points in the review are found in basic usability—the form-over-function values of the designers leaves affordance behind. While there is a nice garden of content to explore, the path is unnecessarily rocky. MarthaStewart.com is also a site with great potential in terms of community. The current online community offerings, message boards, are not sufficient. However the company has announced plans to create new functionalities, much like MySpace, for their target audience of 25- to 45-year-old women. Their strong brand has created an existing community-minded following that is desperate for an outlet. The site re-launch is scheduled for Fall of 2007 and hopefully we'll come back then to see this scorecard grade greatly improved.

KnittersReview.com Website Design Review
Knitters Review is a Great Web-product for the Target Audience of Knitters. It's Easy to Use, Easy to Read, Easy to Interact With and the Brand has Integrity.

Knitter's Review is a six-year-old site run by a small group of enthusiasts. Their story in the About pages tells of publishing veteran Clara Parkes, who left the rat race where she produced large scale websites and escaped to the peace of rural Maine to focus on doing something she loved. She has two compatriots who represent the operational and technical ends of KnittersReview.com (KR), and the support of her friends, family and postmistress, but not much else. In other words, a true hands-on, do-it-yourself success story.

The success of the site is readily apparent in the plethora of forum posts. This is the real deal, a community site that has been brought together via KR's weekly editorial product reviews. The site makes its revenues through advertising and their own store. It is a true Mequoda network that is run without a large publishing company behind it—just good old-fashioned know-how.

KnittersReview.com follows the Hub model, with three spokes:

• Editorial—Knitter's Review Magazine
• Ecommerce—Knitter's Review Boutique
• Community—Knitter's Review Forum

Each of these sections of the network serve a different business purpose (selling advertising, selling products, bringing in traffic) and therefore require a specific site design and navigation. Since KR is relatively small, we can cover all three micro-sites in a single review and take a look at some particular issues like global navigation, persistent navigation and branding.

RD.com Website Design Review
Reader's Digest Online Version is a Great Example of an Old Brand Taking their Show Online Successfully.

Reader's Digest is so well known and widely read that almost everybody has picked up a copy at some point in their lives. Founded in 1922, the family friendly, feel-good favorite is also the flagship of a billion dollar public company. The Reader's Digest is the largest-selling magazine in the world, and the company uses their circulation power to sell a plethora of books, magazines, games and children's titles, and recently music video and audio books.

RD.com draws in over 600,000 monthly unique users. We'll see in this review how the site RD.com expands the value of the print brand by bringing their trademark interactivity and community strengths right onto the small screen.

• It isn't obvious to a casual user that subscribing is a priority action. RD.com doesn't ignore this goal, but the design places subscription offers in the background, and is unnecessarily subtle compared to the rest of the site.
• They've done a great job in content webification. The homepage has a TV-screen like display, they've got "RD Out Loud," which is a podcast service, they have a ton of interactive tools and lots of games.
• Throughout the site, when reading articles, the user is often prodded to submit a joke or comment—to participate. The site has the same community feel that the magazine has always been famous for.
• With a slightly older age range of readers, RD.com is ahead of the curve with their super-usable "click to enlarge or reduce font sizes" A+ A- [[icons]].
• RD.com integrates well with Reader's Digest on paper, each one references the other. The user will "get" that these are two ways of naming the same brand.

The Hub for Internal Communicators Website Design Review
An Online-Only Membership Website is a Good Idea for Melcrum, and The Hub is Taking the Right Steps to Bring the Promised Value to Both the Company and to the Audience

The Hub for Internal Communicators is a membership website with research, information and tools for communication professionals. The product and the audience are identified in the tagline: The most comprehensive resource available for employee communication professionals.

Produced by Melcrum, an information and research company with offices in the UK, North America and Australia, The Hub for Internal Communicators (The Hub) has been online as a UK site since 2005 and launched a North American version shortly after.

Melcrum is wholly owned by founders Victoria Mellor and Robin Crumby and currently publishes a number of editorial journals, research products and workshops, conferences and events. The Hub, which is the most recent addition to the group of Melcrum's information products, has no print version, but is a membership website/resource with a yearly subscription fee of £395/$595 (full price).

The Hub has shown a fantastic aptitude for some of the Mequoda Scorecard criteria. We expect that the well-defined strategic intent, the excellent readability and lovely aesthetics will quickly endear the site to readers. There is also room for growth as other criteria such as content webification, relationship building and brand preference are lacking some oomph. Overall, the scorecard shows that The Hub has a good foundation to serve their audience well, and bring value to English-speaking business communicators across the globe.

• Internalcommshub.com is a landing page for an unknown user, and a homepage for a current customer who is not logged in. The layout has to balance the needs of two kinds of visitors, and this layout does.
• How could the site get an A in the content webification category? Here are some examples: expand the content mix with podcasts, blogs and video to bring the content to users in additional channels, and engage the audience more intensely.
• Facilitating communication between members could directly affect revenues for Melcrum. For example, Melcrum hosts events, and it would be a natural for members to be able to reconnect with other members who they had met in person at those events.
• The Hub is truly a lovely site. There is plenty of white space to rest the eye and allow users to focus on the content.
• While a paid membership site does have an obligation to reduce the marketing push because members will expect more content and less marketing, the site design shouldn't make it hard to find other Melcrum products either.

WoodcraftMagazine.com Website Design Review
WoodcraftMagazine.com is a Sturdy Site That Will Serve the Purposes of the Master Brand, but Won't Warm the Hearts of the Audience.

Woodcraft Supply Corp. is a leading seller of woodworking tools. The company has been around for 75 years and sells via retail, online and in over 3 million catalogues globally. Expanding the woodcrafting empire, the company publishes a magazine, licenses franchises, offers classes with certified continuing education credits and acts as a trade organization for woodworking teachers. Running all of these businesses through a single website would be a recipe for disaster, and Woodcraft has rightly chosen to create a branded network of sites to fulfill the diverse business goals. This review details the website design of the magazine site, WoodcraftMagazine.com.

The Woodcraft Network:

• Commerce: Woodcraft, Woodcraft.com
• Editorial: Woodcraft Magazine
• Learning: Woodcraft University
• Gallery: Woodcraft Gallery
• Community: Woodworking Teachers Network

Variations in the URLs mirror Woodcraft's strategy of a consistent look and feel for all of the sites, with visual cues and navigation changes to fulfill site-specific goals. A user will always know they are within the Woodcraft brand, and be able to find their way to the other sites in the network easily.

• WoodcraftMagazine.com's links to the other sites in the network serves the parent company's business goals by increasing traffic entry points.
• There isn't much that is innovative here. Archives, Web-extras, event listings and search are pretty basic. Print readers are not given many reasons to go online.
• Skipping the community building devices that would encourage user involvement with each other places the site on a weak foundation.
• WoodcraftMagazine.com uses a left-hand navigation that remains consistent on every page. The only exception being order pages, which appropriately simplifies the navigation down to bare essentials (removing the temptation to click out of the process).
• While the affordance is clear, the 'click here's' should be replaced to bring the site up to current standards.

Craigslist.org Website Design Review
The Incredible Website Usability of Craigslist.org is a Key Component in the Success of this Community Phenomenon.

Craigslist (CL) was a simple community classified site started in 1995 by Craig Newmark (yes, Virginia, there is a Craig). The originally-non-profit site was incorporated in 1999. There are 190 versions of the website—localized by city—throughout the world, featuring free classified advertisements (jobs, housing, for sale, services, personals, gigs and community) and forums.

Although Jim Buckmaster was brought in as CEO in 2000, Craig has kept the titles of Founder, Chairman and Customer Service Representative. Having the company founder list "Customer Service Representative" among his titles would seem like a cheesy bit of PR, but in this case there is enough evidence to support the truth of the intent. Craig has kept his "service mission and non-corporate culture" values central to how he runs the company. For example:

• The site has a peace symbol favicon, and keeps a dot-org level domain as well as a dot-com.
• Craig's Blog talks about his personal views on Internet (and other) issues, not an excuse for CL PR.
• Users can comment on corporate decisions, and negative comments are not removed.
• Although as a private company CL could keep a lot quieter, the recent Fair Housing lawsuit (in Chicago) is publicly discussed on the site.
• CL accepts no banner advertising.
• CL runs a non-profit foundation.
• The About pages include words like: inclusive, giving a voice to the disenfranchised and humane, non-commercial environment.

This touchy-feely community site has had some serious business success. Craigslist has more than 10 million users and 8 million classified ads each month. While there are no public revenue numbers, given the simple business model, we can make a reasonable estimate. The site accepts paid listings for job postings from NY and LA ($25), and SF ($75). With about 1000 listings per workday, multiplying out for 260 workdays per year, revenues for 2006 should be at least $33 million.

TMZ.com Website Design Review
AOL's New Entertainment Site, TMZ.com Has Everything Going For It. In Addition to Having a Great Background, the Excellent Website Design Scores for TMZ.com Make it Easy to Predict a Shining Future.

On December 8, 2005, AOL's expected press release announcing the launch of the new entertainment site, TMZ.com, hit the buzz-makers. The commentary? Only that AOL needed a massive influx of traffic, and that even in the crowded online entertainment space the subsidiary of Time Warner should be able to put up enough interesting new tidbits to draw in the ever-celeb-hungry masses. TMZ.com, which stands for the "Thirty Mile Zone" around Hollywood (apparently in people know these sorts of things), claims to be a "new, first-of-its-kind 24/7 on-demand entertainment news network." The interesting word choices here are "on-demand" and "network." As shown in this review, TMZ.com does lives up to these claims, if falling a bit short on others.

This Mequoda Website Design Scorecard Review points out some of the following best practices:

• A free content site with great content (continuously fresh headlines, exclusive videos and a well-stocked archive) and a good ratio of Advertising to Editorial exhibits an excellent implementation of Strategic Intent.
• Aesthetically TMZ.com is struggling with finding just the right style—no best-dressed awards here.
• Usability is near perfect, with As in Readability, Affordance and Labeling and Language—the extensive online experience of parent AOL is obvious.
• TMZ.com's overpowering parent AOL gives the site a leg up in the world by bringing an entire network's worth of technology and skill to the newly launched site.
• But TMZ.com has to be allowed to stand on its own brand to really fly.

VanityFair.com Website Design Review
The Most Pressing Question About VanityFair.com is the Strategy of the Site. Is it a True Content Site or Just Marketing Print Subscriptions?

Vanity Fair is one of those cultural icons that doesn't have to introduce itself. But, being a bit of a cultural dork myself, I'll let them do it anyway:

"With a unique mix of image and intellect, Vanity Fair captures the people, places and ideas that are defining modern culture. From the arts and entertainment, to sports and media, to politics and world affairs, Vanity Fair is what the world is talking about now."—Vanity Fair Media Kit.

VanityFair.com, the online presence of Vanity Fair magazine, is a mixed bag as far as the Mequoda website design scorecard is concerned. The most pressing question being about the strategy of the site. Is it a true content site or just marketing print subscriptions? The overview—there are some real A-list moments here, but also some B-list moves.

A-List:

• Great subscription marketing strategy: the site increases print subscribers with multiple points of entry to the order form.
• Exclusive multimedia content: getting additional, webified content from existing editorial efforts creates a reason to visit the site and extend the brand reach.
• Community: the chattering classes are given a forum to express their witty opinions.

  B-List

• Content: a shallow site is too easy to love and leave.
• Site Design: confusing navigation makes what content there is, harder to find.
• Relationships: with no relationship-building devices, readers can't even pretend they're in the VIP room.

Investors.com Website Design Review
Investors.com is an Excellent Example of a Publisher Taking Advantage of the Synergies Between Audience Information Needs and Technology's Ability to Facilitate the Satisfaction of Those Needs

Investors.com, an online edition of Investor's Business Daily, is the sort of site that the core audience loves with a fierce loyalty. With a focus on the signature stock analysis methodology, deep data diving and just the need-to-know news, the website doesn't have a lot of splashy design and is exceptionally un-exciting for non-investors.

Investors.com is a deep site that succeeds well in providing a plethora of ways for getting and displaying data crucial for the avid trader. Investment junkies love it; IBD knows how to speak to their core audience.

IBD was launched by an energetic, successful young investor named William J. O'Neil in 1984. Creating a competitor to the WSJ originally earned him a lot of derision, but he has built a publication that commands respect in the investment world. With a paid circulation of 215,000 and 50,000 digital edition subscribers, IBD is a player in financial publishing.

The parent company William O'Neil + Co. Inc created IBD by focusing on improvements in an underdeveloped niche in business publications. By "identifying the common characteristics of stocks that historically have performed well," O'Neil made his own fortune, and through his books and lectures promises to help others do the same. In other words, he's targeting those who love playing the market, active investors who are as addicted to data as gamblers.

• The strategic intent of the advertising/subscription hybrid site is immediately clear.
• Readers are encouraged to create community through online forums and real-world Meetups.
• Content webification gives the reader many options for slicing, displaying and downloading data.
• The language used for navigation, site icons and titles of IBD specific tools and features, are consistently explained and defined in a clear and polite manner.
• The links look like links and underlining and colors are used according to website design standards.

The Samsung SyncMaster 710MP Landing Page Review
While We Can Point to Each Specific Mistake in the Landing Page Scorecard Criteria, the Root Problem in this Samsung Product Landing Page is a Lack of Focus

The global consumer electronics company Samsung currently has a campaign running on Forbes.com which caught our eye at Mequoda. The animated rectangle advertisement on the top of the magazine's homepage rotates through several products, each with its own landing page. We've selected the SyncMaster 710mp LCD product landing page for scrutiny. This review reveals how lack of marketing focus can hinder campaign goals.

This particular ad/landing page combo is for a high-end TFT LCD three-in-one monitor targeted at the home consumer market. The pitch focuses on style, quality and a reduced price point. The goals of the campaign are unclear—as the page focus vacillates between getting an email sign up, linking to more product information and additional links to well-known online retailers where the product can be purchased directly.

Samsung is not a retailer and more of their advertising experience follows a brand marketing rather than direct advertising model. This background is obvious in the confused objectives and muddily-executed landing page for this campaign. An attractive design and interesting story are wasted on a campaign that is unsure of its goals. Since the landing page asks the visitor for an email address, we assume the main goal for this campaign is to build an email marketing database. This page falls short on many of the landing page criteria designed to clarify each aspect of how to achieve that goal.

Specifically:

• The headline focuses on price point, even though there is no direct purchase option.
• The image animation takes the viewer's eye away from the product.
• Out of the nine links on the page, only one of them actually fulfills the email signup order flow.
• There is no sense of urgency, the visitor has no reason to take any action at all.
• Link design makes it easy for the user to leave the page without signing up.

GardenGateMagazine.com Website Design Review
A Well-Planned Strategy, Attractive Website Design and Thoughtful Attention to User Tasks Makes GardenGateMagazine.com an Absolute Blueprint for an Effective Magazine Marketing Website

Creating a marketing site with effective website design for a print magazine seems like a simple task. Unfortunately, too often the result is anything but elegant. The typical site starts with the best of intentions, but slowly "content creep" invades the process and the links grow like weeds, creating an overgrown mess that serves no one well. August Home Publishing has proven equal to the task of building an excellent magazine marketing site for the print magazine GardenGate, growing a perfect rose of a site. A well-planned strategy, attractive website design and thoughtful attention to user tasks have created an absolute blueprint for magazine marketing sites.

• GardenGate Magazine is one of several magazines published by August Home Publishing, owned and founded by Donald Peschke.
• Today the company publishes five print magazines, a retail store, mail order business and a host of websites for the at-home builder, gardener and creative cook.
• With $35 million in revenues, the company has twice been named one of the fastest growing privately owned companies in America by Inc. magazine.
• Peschke says he sees the future of the company's growth in "ancillary sales of editorial content in various repurposed forms."
• With the Internet as the natural distribution point for this editorial sales growth, we look to the Mequoda Website Design Scorecard to see if the publisher of GardenGate Magazine is planting the right seeds.

Pepsi.com Brand Marketing Website Case Study
Pepsi.com, a Very Successful Brand Site, Chose a Target Audience, Explored the Audience's Needs, Determined Their Own Business Goals, and Designed a Smash Hit of a Site

The first question everyone asks: "Why would anyone go to Pepsi.com?" This is because we mostly think of the Web as a distribution vehicle. We think of ordering books at Amazon, or reading content at CNN, or downloading music from MTV. How do you drink a soda on a computer screen?

So, who goes to Pepsi.com? Load up the fun, entertainment-packed Pepsi.com and it's obvious in a glance. The site is clearly designed to attract and entertain teens and young adults, the current target demographic for Pepsi. The strategy works, Pepsi.com ranked #4 by visits in the Food and Beverage Brand category, (Coca-cola.com ranked #14) by Hitwise. But if you can't sell anything on your site, why devote the human resources, time and budget to create it? In other words, what's the payback?

• The goal of the branding website is to use the opportunity to strengthen the brand identity, to build upon the intangible emotional connection in the mind of the loyal consumer.
• Pepsi.com is an excellent example of a branding website—the use of colors, logos and complete look and feel integrate well into the overall brand image.
• They have fully integrated online and offline marketing, with offline promotions driving traffic to the site, and online promotions gathering more information from visitors for offline marketing efforts.
• The site has interactive functions that encourage repeat visits and viral marketing, including downloads, online games and music mixing applications.
• Pepsi chose a target audience (teens and young adult consumers), found out what they want (entertainment, music and sports), determined their own business goals (build the brand, traffic and awareness) and designed a smash hit of a site.

SalaryExpert.com Website Design Review
Unclear Strategic Intent, Non-existent Content Webification and Relationship Building are All Letting Visitors Run Around in Circles on SalaryExpert.com, or Worse, Just Run Off the Site with No Reason to Return

Like a company without an org chart, SalaryExpert.com leaves the visitor wondering who's in charge. Part of a loosely-stitched network of sites, SalaryExpert.com brings in subscription revenues to the parent company Baker Thomsen Associates (BTA is in turn a subsidiary of the Economic Research Institute) from both HR professionals and career minded individuals.

The site's landing page/marketplace strategy is distracted by hub-like linking behavior, sending users all over the network. While the site's foundations rest on a solid website design base in Labeling, Readability and Content Organization, the top level website design criteria decisions seem to have been made by an executive committee that spent too long at lunch. Strategic Intent, Content Webification and Relationship Building are all letting visitors run around in circles, or worse, just run off the site with no reason to return.

• Unclear Strategic Intent—users are continuously sent off-site.
• Non-existent Content Webification and Relationship Building lose visitors and increase customer acquisition costs.
• Solid design base underpins a site ready for strategic growth.
• User task depth was a success—all tasks were possible to fulfill with relative ease.
• The Affordance, Labeling and Language and Aesthetics of the were all appropriate to its audience.

eSkyGuide.com Website Design Review
EskyGuide.com, the Online Home of Executive Travel Magazine, While Demonstrating Good Readability and Affordance, Tries to do Too Much From One Site, Causing Brand Confusion, Task Incompletion and Lack of Relationship Building

"Executive Travel Guide", or is it "eSkyGuide," or maybe just "Executive Travel"? And we've already hit on one of the jet-sized website design holes in the site eSkyGuide.com. Executive Travel SkyGuide is trying to do too many things from one site, and not managing any of them well. Some of the Mequoda Website Scorecard criteria with turbulence: Brand (too many destinations), Task Depth (can't find the gate) and Relationship Building (the flight attendants are on strike).

Owned by American Express Publishing, eSkyGuide should have the backing to do this website design right. While some of the more basic criteria such as Readability and Affordance earned a respectable B, the more complex relationships with visitors have not been kept up to speed, and the frequent executive traveler will be considering changing his/her travel plans and flying a different URL.

• eSkyGuide.com is owned by American Express Publishing, a private subsidiary of American Express Company. They have several other titles, including Food & Wine, Travel & Leisure, T&L Golf and T&L Family, with total sales of about 63 million.
• Completely invisible on eSkyGuide.com's website design is anything resembling community building devices. There are no comment forms, boards, anything that would bring the rather specific group of high-flyers a sense of camaraderie or belonging to a unique groups of individuals.
• eSkyGuide.com has done pretty well on persistent navigation. Primary task links are consistently placed on the pages, and easy to find.
• Although the language is simple and easy to understand, I don't see any audience-centric words, nothing to represent the educated executive readers, no keywords or phrases specific to the frequent flyer/executive traveler.
• While the basics are in place and the site is functioning, I want to see a single name brand promoted, a single site strategy and purpose clearly articulated and executed, and I want more relationship building and content webification to give me reasons to return.

Fundcraft.com Website Design Review
Readability, Aesthetics and Labeling Help Fundcraft.com's Users Feel Right at Home, but Navigation and Affordance in Fundcraft.com's Website Design are Confusing to Users, and Could be Losing Potential Sales

Fundcraft Publishing provides turn-key printing services to create customized fundraising cookbooks for their customers, bringing in sales of $40 million in 2004. Fundcraft Publishing is an example of a successful, family-owned printing company that has jumped to the Web to build on their existing business. Along the way, they have made huge website design and usability mistakes. Fundcraft owns a network of sites, and using the Mequoda Website Scorecard on the hub of the network—Fundcraft.com—we can learn how to cook that Christmas turkey just right, and how to watch out for those underdone pink areas. Fundcraft.com's website design efforts earned As in strategy and readability and fell into some unnecessary mistakes in navigation and affordance.

• Fundcraft.com's site strategy and product offer is clear to the user from every page
• Readability, aesthetics and labeling help Fundcraft.com's users feel right at home
• Navigation and affordance on Fundcraft.com are confusing to users, and could be losing potential sales
• Fundcraft.com clearly supports the brand on almost every page, however they occasionally hijack visitors to another Fundcraft site in their network that does not promote or even mention the Fundcraft brand
• While there are many website design problems on Fundcraft.com, the company is successful and the site gets enough right to be a value-add to their marketing, customer service and distribution efforts

WSJ Membership Website Case Study
Skillful Leveraging of Brand, Strategic Site Design and Continuous Attention to the Balance of Traffic to Gated Content Has Contributed to the Market-Leading Position Currently Enjoyed by The Wall Street Journal

As the business journal of record, and perhaps the most well known business journal in the world, The Wall Street Journal seems a shoe-in to be successful online as well. What we can learn from The Wall Street Journal is not that a great brand makes life easy (although it doesn't hurt), but that picking a strategy, and sticking to it, is the key to their success. While competitors have chosen to make their sites free and keep the gates to content open to all visitors, WSJ.com went the path less traveled, and is now well known as the largest paid content news site with 744,000 subscribers.

Looking back, with 10 years under their belt in the turbulent online publishing world, success was never a guarantee. The success of the paid content strategy of WSJ.com is the result of drawing a line in the sand, and focusing everything else behind that decision.

Published by Dow Jones & Company, The Wall Street Journal was founded in 1995, with the first 100,000 paid subscribers reached by 1997. The Wall Street Journal offers 1,000 news stories added a day, 30 email options, 20 exclusive columns, 30,000 publicly traded companies covered worldwide, interactive tools and market research. They boasted 744,000 paid subscribers in Q2 2005, with an estimated $56 million in online subscription revenues.

MeansBusiness.com Website Design Review
MeansBusiness, while a very viable and intriguing online content model, makes some critical areas in their website design practices, lagging behind their peers in the areas of community building, affordance and labeling.

MeansBusiness targets a business learning audience. They have a database that includes 20,000 verbatim extracts from 1,000 business books—all of which are intelligently selected and packaged into short segments. Their goal is to repurpose high-quality business content to build a new digital product that they can sell to corporations, universities and individuals.

They make money by getting visitors to become paid subscribers, or to opt-in with their email for future contact. They also aim to get corporate or academic visitors to buy a customized institutional-level subscription. Additionally, they earn extra revenues via book sales. This is a great online business model, but their website design is missing the boat in many instances.

In this website design review, we determine that the homepage is not well presented or prioritized, and it's hard to understand what they do right away. There are no community building efforts on the site. Affordance was bad, icons didn’t make sense and weren’t clickable, image links didn’t look like links and text looked like a link but wasn’t. While the potential is there, MeansBusiness is in need of some serious brushing up in order to be on the right track.

Morningstar.com Website Design Review
We are still in the dawn of the Internet age and Morningstar.com is one of the early lights in the crowded online investment information sky. In this website design review, Terri Edmonston looks at Morningstar.com, peruses through all 14 website design guidelines and determines they get an A. Of particular interest is the well-articulated line between paid and free content, and the excellent webification of a publication that started its life in 1984 as a fund rating guide for investors.

Morningstar is primarily a subscription and licensing business, with additional revenues from individual product sales and advertising. This 20-year-old public company had revenues of $179 million in 2004 from providing investment research via Internet, software and print-based products. Flagship print publications include Morningstar Mutual Funds, Morningstar StockInvestor and Morningstar FundInvestor. Content is also distributed via their websites: Morningstar.com (launched in 1997) and MorningstarAdvisors.com.

Her lasting impression after combing through the pages is one of a well-executed site that matches the audience, manages strategic goals, and provides a pleasant and usable information service, utilizing most aspects of successful website design.

BabyCenter.com Website Design Review
In this website design review, Terri Edmonston looks at BabyCenter LLC, which is just what it sounds like. Much like the community center in the local church, this site helps anxious parents and parents-to-be find answers to everything they need. This well-designed, interactive website brings reliable advice to a consumer audience, along with peer-support for the most anxiety producing experience many of us will ever have—parenting.

BabyCenter is a subsidiary of Johnson & Johnson, giving it the resources to bring the best of Web technology to bear on their goal of being the center for all things parent-related. The site won a 2005 People’s Voice Webby Award, and enjoys 3.2 Million unique visitors a month. Before she even whips out the 14 website design guidelines, she knows the site is going to do well.

BabyCenter offers a real value to their target audience, and they’ve taken every opportunity to facilitate the different needs of the user while still promoting their revenue-generating objectives. While Load Time and Readability need a good brush-up, this site scored excellently on the 14 Mequoda website design and usability guidelines.

Computerworld.com Website Design Review
Established print publications, especially trade publications, typically have a hard time letting go of their print roots and embracing all the new functionalities and usability features that are required for a great content website. This is why we use a tool like the Mequoda Website Scorecard, to give us unbiased rules to sleuth out the good and bad of the online design.

In this website design review, Terri Edmonston takes a detailed look at Computerworld.com to determine how well it does letting go of its print roots. She studies the 14 website design guidelines and finds that Computerworld.com, while impressive in most areas, could use a little TLC in areas that are user-focused.

They scored As in Strategic Intent, Labeling and Language, Task Depth, Content Freshness and Aesthetics (only five of the 14 criteria). This demonstrates that there is definitely room for improvement. If it were Terri's to do, she would focus first on improving the user-friendly criteria such as Navigation, Content Density and Load Time, and then look to improvements such as increased Relationship Building and Organization.

WebMD.com Website Design Review
In this website design review, Terri Edmonston looks at WebMD.com. She analyzes the site using the 14 website design guidelines and determines that they are a healthy site indeed. They passed the website design scorecard with a well earned A.

As we all know, there is no shortage of health information online, from governmental to non-profit consumer groups, pharmaceutical-funded and alternative medicine sites, to the verifiable quacks. Everyone wants to make the best decisions about our healthcare, and determining what information is reliable, and what isn’t, can be a daunting task. This is something WebMD clearly knows—as seen on the homepage title tag “WebMD—Trustworthy, Credible, and Timely Health Information.” Therefore, earning your visitor’s trust is a key goal for a health information content site.

WebMD has been one of the best sites we've analyzed. There is very little to complain about. Looking back, we see an A in almost every category. The special strengths are the community building and interactive tools. The criteria where we see some room for improvement include relationship building and content readability.

Hello Guest! | Log in

Tell Me about the Library

Increase text size: A A A

Handbooks

Case Studies

Expert Reviews

Software

Wine Spectator's Sips & Tips: Email Newsletter Review

InternationalLiving.com Travel Website Design Review

The Wall Street Journal’s Media and Marketing Edition: Email Newsletter Review

Implement a Mequoda Marketing System

Create User-Centric Websites

Join Don, Kim and Amanda:
Mequoda Summit Napa Valley 2009
April 1-3 2009