Devoted to branding and building and protecting brands

Does your web site work as hard -- and as smart -- as you do? 

There's a way to find out. Just for grins, go here and see if your company is listed.  If so, see if you agree with our assessment of your site.  

In the interest of transparency, I will say upfront that my shop prepared these benchmarks for purely commercial reasons. But there’s almost a pro-bono aspect to it. If I were still on the client side, as I was for 20 years in Silicon Valley, I’d be all over this “benchmark” thing as I thought it might reflect on me.  If my company scored well, I’d be praising my team for good work and waving it around the office like a good report card. If my score was something less that I thought it could be, I’d probably get defensive at first.  Then I’d quietly start to see how I could improve it.  The point is, too many company web sites are slackers.  They don’t work nearly as hard as the people who design and oversee them.  Why?  In the first place, they’re not really designed to as work hard as they could. Which is astonishing when you consider that they are a fundamentally important corporate asset and a central element in any company’s sales, marketing, and recruiting efforts. But they’re typically designed from the inside out – seeing the world through the lens of whatever product or “message” the company is trying to sell. 

Superior sites, the ones that are truly revenue-minded, are informed by an outside-in perspective.  A point of view enabled by seeing your product through the eyes of the people for whom it’s intended, and using the same language and terminology those people use.  So, what’s your point of view?  Does your web site sweat or snooze?