Designing Effective Online Press Rooms

Designing Effective Online Press Rooms

1. Introduction
2. Press Room Usability
3. Five Reasons for Visiting
4. Philip Morris
5. Bank of America
6. Apple Computer
7. Recommendations
8. Enhancements
9. Conclusions
10. Works Cited

Adaptive Web Sites: An Introduction

Designing for Overseas Chinese Readers

TradeOff Cube: A Graphical User Interface Device

By Matthew Tevenan
Page 5 of 10

<--previous             next-->

Bank of America's corporate site would presumably be geared toward financial reporters and investors-perhaps even more so than to mainstream reporters.

Figure 2. Bank of America "Newsroom" left nav bar (click to view live site)

Though the "Newsroom" is not as immediately obvious as on the Philip Morris site, it is located in a logical place: on the left edge of the page, under the "Inside Bank of America" popup menu. Once there, the wealth of information available easily outshines that of Philip Morris. Most of the page is taken up by the obligatory latest press releases, but an easily-navigable left bar lists the options available to people perusing the site (see Figure 2). Those options include archived press releases, speeches by executives, executive profiles, media contacts, press kits, media archive searches, and corporate "fast facts." Also on the Newsroom page is the latest Bank of America stock price, as well as links to detailed corporate financial information.

The information provided on the Bank of America corporate "Newsroom" page fulfills the basic five needs of journalists as stated above, and then some. The information provided is also helpful to investors and consumers, and its completeness helps add to customer-and community-confidence in the corporation by bolstering its corporate image.

<--previous             next-->

Copyright © 2001 by Matthew Tevenan. All rights reserved.