Home page construction: Content is king

"Many companies invested in the construction of professional Web sites around the time of their initial public offering (IPO) but have neglected them in the long run," says Uwe Kamenz, professor of marketing at the Vocational College of Dortmund, Germany, and the co- founder of the ProfNet Institute, which for the last few years has studied home pages for entire industries.

"Investor relation work over the Internet is showing unmistakable signs of fatigue," Kamenz adds. In the study "Investor Relations 2000," the ProfNet Institute examined the Internet sites of around 280 publicly held companies. The conclusion: there is plenty of "room for improvement." This and other similar research results cast some light on an area that burns at the fingertips of Web surfers: few providers succeed at creating a web site of real value. "Most things found on the Net are pretty weak," finds Gerhard Schub von Bossiazky as well, a marketing professor at the Vocational College of Dortmund. "Every magazine on the rack tries to be interesting, but the same can't be said of most Web pages. At the very least, one doesn't seem to notice any effort in this area." In cooperation with the ad agency BBDO Group, the professor conducted an "innovative effectiveness analysis of Web sites" to put sites under the microscope. "One-hundred testers judged the Web sites of 25 so-called business-to-consumer sites," said Schub von Bossiazky. "The average number of pages called-up was disappointing."

Of the twenty-five sites, only three managed to induce more than four page requests per user, and most came in at only one or two further page calls. "Users tended to leave the Web site before they came to concrete topical information," said Schub von Bossiazky. "Because of a lack of attractive content, site providers rarely succeeded at tying visitors to a site or motivating them to visit the site again at a later time." The many annoyances that surfers experienced when visiting a site only added to this trend, with 48 per cent of the testers complaining of a lack of an easily accessible overview of the site's offerings. Another 40 per cent complained that there was no response to queries they submitted online, and fully 36 per cent complained that the offerings were simply incomprehensible. "The content of many sites is not geared to the requirements of online users," says Thomas Huber, BBDO press spokesman in Duesseldorf. "In many cases, existing brochures or catalogues were simply transferred to the Web. In some cases special effects or animations were built in, but these often tended to make the user more confused."

The market research institute Ears and Eyes (EAE) recently went looking for the right combination on behalf of Internet magazine Online Today. The Web site Trends 2001, which reports the results of the study, makes one thing clear: Web surfers are very demanding about how things should be offered on the Web. In a special laboratory, the so-called IQ Lab, EaE marketing researcher Ruediger Arndt arranged for 250 testers to judge a range of criteria for Internet sites. The reviewers assigned each factor a priority rating between one (most important) and six (least important). One surprising result: Users placed a relatively low value on quantity of information; at an average of 2.5 or 2.6, this point ended up only in the middle of the expectations field. Users were also willing to do without extravagant layouts. The average poll on this variable was between 2.4 and 2.5. "It was astounding that the evaluations varied only within a very narrow area," says Arndt. "Users don't want any fancy animation," Arndt says. "They are satisfied with a pleasant, quiet site. Furthermore, all of the graphic effects tend to burden the download times." And this is one area where the surfers were sensitive. At an average rating of 1.6 to 1.7, users found the quick load-times for desired pages to be one of the most pressing requirements.

"The rule of thumb for chance surfers is that the image has to be up on the screen within seven seconds," says Ruediger Arndt. Freshness of information is also one of the top priorities, receiving an average rating of 1.6 to 1.7. "It's annoying when one always sees the exact same thing on Web sites, with no updates." Still, in spite of these complaints about how home pages are packaged, the biggest concern of Internet surfers- at a valuation of 1.5 to 1.6- is the most impossible-to-overlook factor of all: the quality of the content.

(dpa)