[Sigia-l] Seeking Best Practices: order for chaos

[Fred Beecher]

On 9/13/05, Drop, Daniel              SIK <ddrop at sikorsky.com> wrote:
> Jon Littell:
> 
> > How do you create a ³wrapper² for huge, decentralized organization??
>
> They viewed their responsibility from a top-down perspective. Can users find
> what they need from the home page? It's an important question, but it
> ignores the fact that many users don't start from the home page. Powerful
> search tools, directories, blogs, social bookmarks, and syndication services
> are moving deep linking and content sampling from exception to rule. Many of
> your users will never visit your home page... Can users find what they need
> from wherever they are? That's the multi-channel communication question we
> should be asking.
> 
> >From Peter's thoughts, another question you may ask is "How do you allow
> users to get whatever they need from anywhere in a decentralized
> organization?"

This is something I'm coming across in some of my current work as
well. I'm working with a large, decentralized medical systems company,
and recent user research we've done has told us that nearly 90% of
people who are searching for health information (about conditions
and/or treatments) do so via Google *first.* They may go to Mayo or
WebMD, but they'd never go to a manufacturer's site. This is very much
in keeping with what Peter is saying above.

So my advice is that you should really find out how users are coming
to the site. Scour your metrics/analytics system for referrers and
destination pages. Interview people who are not necessarily site users
but who are your target audience to find out how potential users would
arrive at your site.

If people *are* primarily coming in via search engines, you'll want to
support that behavior with something like section/business unit
landing pages that get people to the relevant content within that
section. Ideally, these landing pages would all be based on a single
template, but from your description it doesn't look like this will
happen. A side benefit of this technique is that these landing pages
can also support any search engine optimization activities you may
have going on.

But again, all this is only valid if your visitors *are* coming in
from search engines.

Take care,
Fred.

Fred Beecher,
Evantage Consulting