PixelMEDIA

If your company was acquired or you’ve launched a corporate community site, you may have already wrestled with how to “Frankenstein” something new into your web content and brand family. I say “Frankenstein” because, after you’ve inconsistently bolted a few large changes to your beautiful web presence, it may not be as pretty or usable as it used to be.

We often see companies make large changes to their online properties to highlight their branded names, most popular content, and top-converting transaction points without first considering customers, impact on search rankings, or prospective user experiences. Having a structured  approach to integrating new features and content can help boost your company’s credibility and more easily scale web properties for the long haul.

Here are a few examples of corporate publication strategies for delivering content to users based on the audience, from the world’s largest corporate website:

Parent site: http://www.microsoft.com – Core competencies of who you are and what you do. Main navigation umbrella. Contains subdirectories (aka. folders) of grouped information.

Subdomain: http://support.microsoft.com – Focused on specific user needs. May have sub-brand opportunities and extended navigation options.

Child site: http://www.xbox.com – Extends the brand family, and delivers a different navigation and architecture to a completely different audience.

With change come opportunities.

To subdomain or not to subdomain?

What deserves a subdomain? If content is different enough from the core website content and is focused on specific user needs, then a subdomain may make sense. Support and community content such as intranets, blogs, and extranets are usually no-brainers.

Publishing a subdomain may help your search marketing efforts, because you are elevating deep content to the level 1 navigation. But how do you really know if you should invest in creating enough content to substantiate a subdomain, complete with its own navigation system?

Just the facts

Leverage your web activity logs to justify that your existing user community has real needs. Measuring brand equity in terms of return website visitors, subscriptions, and webinars can help build a business case for gradual transitions and reduced drop. And in all of your spare time, stack that with events, email campaigns, search marketing stats, direct mail and other offline channels to help prioritize online changes.

Get customers involved.  Asking customers what they think can build loyalty, enhance sense of community and possibly improve your content if you implement enhancements they ask for. These folks can be very convincing on the big screen at a company meeting, whether they are telling the camera what really stinks about your product or, more rarely, what they like about your support area.

Got New Brand?

Many web architecture changes stem from new company brand initiatives. It may not be a one-step process to jam in two new product families of content under the corporate umbrella – even though that is what the acquisition strategy document says you have to do. If the user needs are very different, then content delivery may need to be tailored.

Rebranding is a hassle all in itself, so we usually ask for a media calendar to help guide your transition to avoid surprises, design and development re-work. Be a good corporate citizen and request the new brand guidelines, stylebook, or whatever the brand police are calling it. This should include web styles, high-resolution versions of your corporate and product logos, corporate imagery, iconography, and video – and not just pantone colors and print specs.

If none of these assets exist, or they are old or just poor, then you may have an opportunity to drive them yourself. If your team is the first to implement “new and improved” corporate guidelines for the web, then you may stand a better chance of publishing quickly if what you produce is better than what is currently published live. You can make the brand police happy, or better yet, completely unresponsive, by inviting them to contribute to your launch plan to include the live publication checklist.

Tags: DNS, Extranet, Frankenstein, Hosting, Subdomain

This entry was posted on Monday, November 10th, 2008 at 5:14 pm and is filed under Uncategorized. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.