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New Study Knocks Silicon Valley Websites
NewsBytes
19-AUG-98
By Matt Hines
SILICON VALLEY, CALIFORNIA, U.S.A., 1998 AUG 19 (Newsbytes)
-- If you were to guess what community was best represented
on the Internet by powerful, flashy sites flaunting its
members' ability to maximize the capabilities of the Web,
you would have to guess Silicon Valley, right? After all,
isn't the vaunted locale the birthplace of so much of the
technology which powers and provides for the very Internet
itself?
The answer to these question may be no.
A new study being released by Shelley Taylor & Associates
later this month will detail the shortcomings of Silicon
Valley developer Web sites. "Missing Links in Silicon
Valley" is the second study by Taylor and her group which
puts corporate Web sites through a grueling set of over 200
evaluation criteria to determine the effectiveness of their
appearance, content and maneuverability. The first study
released by Taylor & Associates highlighted the performance
of global corporations' Web sites and gave out critical
reviews to a majority of the sites it tested. Taylor said
that while Silicon Valley's presence on the Web is somewhat
more effective than that of many major corporations, the
difference between the two groups is not as great as one
might expect.
"Some Silicon Valley companies are arrogant and assume that
they have good Web sites," Taylor said. "But while their
sites were somewhat better than the global companies we have
studied in the past, the difference isn't very great."
Taylor said that her group spent six months developing a set
of criteria on which it would rate 50 Web sites developed by
well-known Silicon Valley companies. Upon arriving at a
chosen company's site, Taylor's group would navigate through
the entire set of pages rating and recording elements from
ease of navigation to how much of the information offered
made sense to have online.
Among the companies surveyed in the study were 3Com, AMD,
Apple, Bay Networks, Cisco, HP, Intel, Netscape, Oracle,
Sun, WebTV and Yahoo!, Taylor said.
The conclusions of the study, which will be released at a
breakfast briefing in Palo Alto, California, on Tuesday Aug
25, center around several major shortcomings of the Silicon
Valley sites.
The largest mistake by many developers' sites, in the eyes
of the study, are their failure to provide information to
current and prospective shareholders. Taylor said that this
was the area where global corporations actually do better
than the Silicon Valley group. Some 48 percent of the
technology companies do not offer investor information,
Taylor said, while over 60 percent of the global companies
studied did.
Another major area of criticism on the part of the study is
in relation to Silicon Valley's approach to online employee
recruitment. Taylor said that while every company complains
about the worker shortage, few have taken forward-thinking
Web strategies to address their needs. She said that while
all companies take resumes over the Web, few have other than
what acts as an in-box. Only 48 percent of the companies
studied had applications available online to gather
information important to their needs. Taylor said that many
of the job postings online also failed to provide posting
dates to let users know how long positions had been
available or if they had already been filled.
"It's impossible in many cases to tell how old a lot of the
content out there is," Taylor said. "If these companies are
serious about addressing their staffing issues, they need to
take a much more serious look at how to use the Web as a
tool to recruit."
What Taylor cites as one of the largest indictments of the
study is that many IT companies' sites are not easy to
navigate. Some do not even include what the study calls
global navigation capabilities, which are functions to let
users return to the home page or flip back to different
areas.
"A lot of these developers are also assuming that the
browser technology that is in use out there is better than
it actually is," Taylor said. "A lot of large companies,
which are prime targets as customers, aren't able to upgrade
to the latest browser versions because of their firewalls or
the expense. Their employees can't utilize a lot of the
information given in the Web sites because the sites might
be too complex."
Taylor said that only 14 percent of the studied companies
had all-text versions of their site available for users
trying to get a quick look without graphics. Laptop users
often look for text-only versions, Taylor said.
Among the tested companies with sites that did fair well
were Autodesk, Sun, Cisco, 3Com, Quantum, Apple, SGI,
Oracle, AMD and Broadvision.
More information on the study is available at
infofarm.com .
Reported By Newsbytes News Network newsbytes.com
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