When it comes to determining best practice in corporate websites, who better to ask than the agencies that produce them? Neil Gibbons looks at the sites that the experts rate most highly:

Not so long ago the idea that a company’s website would be the predominant means of communication was laughable. Little more than a repository for contact details and About Us information, sites were plagued by navigation that was soul-destroyingly slow, with woeful usability and, every now and then, interrupted by a Flash animation that took up half your working day.

But the pace of evolution has been startling. The corporate website is now a functional, intuitive, and often entertaining hub of information that companies proudly hold up as their public face.

This month, Communicate has polled the agencies that produce corporate websites to determine what those in the know regard as the best out there.

Here are the top five:

1. btplc.com

“In web design, you have to keep going forward just to stand still,” says BT corporate site manager Rob Pearce. In what was almost a two-horse race, with two household-name telecoms groups duking it out for top spot, BT edged in front of its rival to claim the mantle of most highly regarded corporate website.

The success of this most recent incarnation of the site – which went live in October 2008 – is a reflection of the group’s willingness to listen to users. It used satisfaction surveys, user groups and benchmarking as part of its improvement plan.

“Criticism of our previous site told us that it was boring,” says Rob Pearce, who has overseen the project for six years. “But the design has evolved radically. We worked with [web design agency] Howell Wong Costello and together we’ve tried to inject life into it and mirror BT as a company. Hopefully, the site now reflects BT’s values while positioning it as a technology leader.”

Pearce understands that, in corporate websites, content is king. And although he owns several areas of the site, he hasn’t sought be overly controlling. “My job is about providing a vehicle,” he says. “Content comes from number of different stakeholder teams such as shareholder services department or the press office, but it’s my job to make sure the site is consistent and cohesive.”

The site sets great store its functionality and Pearce has worked closely with Unitech, the Edniburgh-based provider its content management system to develop an easy-use system which allows flash movie very the unseen work,” says Pearce.

BT has broadened the remit of its homepage considerably, moving away from a blank bleating of corporate facts to, for example, pointing to worthy causes such as Red Nose Day or the fundraising efforts in Darfur.

But perhaps the most impressive aspect of the corporate site is the care with which it treads the line between innovation and ostentation. “People can get cheesed off with 60-second Flash movies every time they load up,” says Pearce. “They just want to get to and assimilate information. At the same time, we do know the technology, we know how to use it and we need to show that.”

BT has, for example, made the site available on mobile phones and created a corporate widget, so that users can access press releases stock price and other highlights from the website without opening a browser.

“I have some more changes in the pipeline for the main page,” Pearce adds. “I want customisation to become even simpler and we’re working on version in other languages – Spanish, German and Polish.”

 

2. orange.com

“As a technology and communications company, we have an obligation to be a point of reference,” says Eric Barilland, Director of Electronic Media at France Telecom, whose corporate site Orange. com was narrowly beaten into second place. “Other companies don’t have that pressure.”

In what he describes “a full rebuild that began with a blank sheet of paper”, Barilland and his team set about meeting three key objectives: “One was to embody the brand identity and vision, even in corporate matters. Two was to reflect the worldwide footprint and global leadership of the group. And three was to involve the corporate site with Web 2.0.”

The group discussed the rebrand internally for a long time before working with digital agency SixandCo. Eventually, the current version was launched in January 2008 and it represented a sea change in the group’s online communications presence. Previously, France Telecom had maintained two sites – Francetelecom.com, which was the corporate website for the group, and Orange.com, which was a window for the Orange brand. The new version, however, married the two under a single URL.

Although not a prominent exponent of the latest generation of online communications, the site has been inspired by web 2.0.

“The main example is the ability to customise the home page, even if it’s not yet being used as much as I’d like,” he says. “For example, click on the ‘bubble planet’ and it allows the user to interact and share news from their own country. Customisation is very important throughout the site. You can open and play with the features. And at the bottom left, you can profile your visit, depending on whether you’re a job seeker, investor, or journalist, for example.” The selection will amend the interface, promoting certain features to the foreground.

According to Barilland, the redesign was not the result of a navel-gazing period of reflection. “We used two ways to get feedback from stakeholders,” he says. “We performed regular quality analyses, using one that had been implemented on the Francetelecom.com site. And we used links for other departments – working with, say, Finance for shareholders, or the CSR team.”

Like BT’s Pearce, Barilland remains as far from megalomaniacal as is possible in his management of the site: “I see it as a channel to communicate. We’re at the service of other departments.”

 

3. centrica.com

Energy group Centrica comes third in our poll. The work of London-based agency The Group since 2001, the latest version of Centrica.com went live in February 2008.

The latest iteration was, in part, a move to rationalise a raft of piecemeal changes that had been made to the previous version. “The site had grown a bit old,” concedes The Group’s strategic director Cathal Smyth. “It had grown and had been updated but it needed a fundamental shake-up.”

A certain impetus came from the arrival of Sam Laidlaw as CEO in 2006. He was keen to tell the Centrica story and wanted its web presence to feel like that of a fully integrated company. “There was no clarity as to what Centrica was about,” says Smyth. “It’s a complicated group with upstream and downstream businesses and we had to work out how to explain that.

We also needed to reflect the international nature of the group. Centrica has operations in the UK, Europe and North America. Although it may be a hard one to define, I think Centrica’s corporate website hangs together very well.”

Part of the challenge lay in the scale of the site. “There really is a lot of content,” says Smyth. “But the whole thing comes across as one integrated company. For example, each business is profiled with a link from the homepage.”

That isn’t to say that The Group looked to make Centrica.com feel compact. In fact, it tried to construct a site that, in its look and feel, matched the scale of the company. “The site feels much more expansive,” says Smyth. “It’s now gone to full-screen width and its look and feel is more like a media portal. It’s like Guardian Unlimited or TimesOnline.”

As an umbrella site that’s home to several businesses, The Group saw nothing wrong in advertising Centrica’s subsidiary brands. “Weirdly, it’s only in the last couple of years that corporate websites have featured ads,” says Smyth. “There was this false divide, with people thinking ‘It’s not the done thing on a corporate site.’ But Centrica’s site features ads for British Gas and its other businesses.”

As with certain other leading-edge corporate sites, Centrica.com makes use of up-to-date technology to improve the user experience. “We have a function called ‘Your Page’,” says Smyth. “Like the BBC’s site, it allows you to drag and drop chosen content into your own content modules, and quite a few users have already signed up.”

For graduates, Centrica presents live webchats every couple of months and Smyth hints that Centrica is about to grasp the social media nettle even more tightly with the launch of a new blog that debates current energy issues.

As for the design of the site, The Group was given plenty of scope to interpret the brand and the needs of users. “We conducted a proper reassessment of what worked and what didn’t,” he says “We’ve tried to make the site customer focused, offering functionality and maximum usability without it becoming a big message. It’s a subtle thing.”

 

4. angloamerican.co.uk

Our fourth-placed site is mining and natural resources group Anglo American. It has been a client of Investis since 2001 but, says Simon Gittings who oversees the account, it’s only relatively recently that Investis was engaged to maximum effect. “At the start we were just a provider of functionality but in 2007, they decided to redesign the website and asked us to pitch,” he says. “We won the pitch.”

Investis worked closely with Anglo American but the client trusted the agency to work its magic without unnecessary interference. “They left us to our own devices to interpret the brand,” says Gittings. “Then we came back with three radically different designs which each reflected a different persona of the company.”

The result was a site that went live in 2008. Describing it as “a broader communication piece”, Investis director Al Loehnis, says that the changing needs of stakeholders prompted a rethink in the structure of the website. “In 2000, companies and audiences were looked at in a more siloed way,” he says. “But now the requirements of different stakeholders overlap which calls for a more holistic single voice.”

According to Gittings, the evolution of the site began with its top-level pages. “We now use those pages to deliver key messages,” he says. “If you look at the ‘About Us’ page for example, there’s a large image that draws people to the key message of safety, as that’s the first thing that Anglo American want to push. As a business it wants to reduce the cost base, therefore it features a story on reducing the cost of tyres.”

With greater functionality and a focus on interactivity, the site, says Gittings, “is more a communications platform than a magazine”. A unique feature, he says, is the ‘Where we operate’ map. “It lets you drill down into individual mines. But more importantly, it supports deep linking, which means you can link from any page. If an individual mine is mentioned, the link takes you to the individual mine not just the mine page. So the map is both a navigational device and a geographic footprint.”

Anglo American has always regarded its site as a live organism – so Investis have remained resolutely hands-on since the current version went live. “At the end of the redesign, you can’t just think ‘phew, we got the project done’,” says Gittings. “It’s got to be living and breathing. People expect it to be current, so it has to move with the development of the company or people will discard it as an information source. It’s ongoing and there are lost of exciting ideas from the initial scoping process which we’re working with Anglo American to introduce in the near future.”

 

5. imperial-tobacco.com

In fifth place is Bristol-based cigarette, cigar and tobacco manufacturers Imperial Tobacco. The Group hasbeen responsible for the website since 2003 and has given the most recent version of the site a no-nonsense tone.

Strategic director Cathal Smyth accepts that the Imperial Tobacco site doesn’t attract the same breadth of consumers as other, more public-facing brands do. Its audience is made up of “an old-school corporate communications and corporate affairs audience, and legislators and NGOs also come to the website.” Nonetheless, back in 2003, The Group immediately saw that the corporate site lacked a distinct identity.

“We conducted an initial audit and scoping exercise,” says strategic director Cathal Smyth. “At the time, Imperial Tobacco regarded itself as a sort of anti-brand. It had individual brands for its products but no clear corporate brand. We built the site around the idea that they’re plain-talkers. The central idea was what you see is what you get.”

According to Smyth, the new site is more sophisticated but still has that directness of approach. “That comes over in the design, the site architecture, even the nomenclature of the different departments of the site.”

In common with other highly regarded sites, Imperial Tobacco takes a measured approach to the available technology, prioritising functionality and straightforwardness over look-at-me flair. “They don’t want to be at the cutting edge or ahead of the pack,” says Smyth. “But they don’t want to get left behind either. They just don’t experiment just for the sake of it.”

 

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