Designing Effective Online Press Rooms

From the evaluation of just three different corporations' online press rooms and the inconsistencies in organization, content, and layout among them, one can see why members of the press become easily frustrated with many corporate PR sites. For these sites and others, suggestions from both the Coyne and Nielsen study and Hubler et al.'s PR News article might help create a better experience for journalists, investors, and consumers: First, corporations must create simple, streamlined experiences for visitors to their PR sites. Flashy animations and graphics must be avoided since they are both unnecessary and can take up bandwidth. Designers must design for speedy information retrieval by creating easy and accurate search capabilities, providing contact information up front, and by writing short but descriptive titles for press releases. Content creators must go beyond the simple corporate-backgrounder-and-press-releases format and provide links to external sources, downloadable artwork and photos, and more detailed content such as white papers and archived webcasts. Finally as with all Web content, corporations must realize that it truly is the World-Wide Web and plan for international journalists: account for differing date formats, low-bandwidth connections, different languages, etc.

<--previous next-->

Designing Effective Online Press Rooms

Designing Effective Online Press Rooms

Adaptive Web Sites: An Introduction

Designing for Overseas Chinese Readers

TradeOff Cube: A Graphical User Interface Device