“Of the top ten companies in the rankings, eight are European based; just two come from the US.”

As a European living in the U.S., I welcome such studies which should encourage us all to learn from each other, regardless of where we come from. The Silicon Valley is not the whole world, and that is a good thing.

• Globally Local — Locally Global: intranet strategies by JMC
• Global Intranet Survey
• IntranetBlog Best Practices
• IntranetReport Best Practices
• Jacob Nielsen’s Intranet Guidelines

Whose fault it was? My Outlook was being proactive in creating a safe environment by disabling links that might lead to an unsafe site (whatever the criteria for this is). Outlook did give me the option of enabling the embedded links by clicking on the top of the tool bar. I enabled the embedded link by making that extra click simply because I decided to use this annoyance for a topic of this post. However, it is very unlikely that I would do that otherwise for a message from a sender I am not familiar with.

Which brings me to the point of email marketing effectiveness and its link with web usability. An email is effective only if it engages the reader and sends them to a website for an action. If I am not compelled to go visit the website, the email did not achieve its goal. If the design of the email prevents me from visiting the target website, it has nobody else to blame for its failure. The email should make it not only compelling for me to click on that link but easy as well. Adding a simple text/HTML link would have solved the problem easily.

I am sure Alterian are very experienced marketers. But everybody can learn and we never stop learning. Taking the time to test their own email campaigns would probably teach Alterian a lesson or two about email marketing effectivenes.

Not surprisingly, the store works fine in Internet Explorer 7:

Now, having the word BETA on a newly launched website is a fine, and nowadays fashionable, excuse — a certainly more elegant solution than the notorious “site under contruction” sign we used to see in the yesteryears — but neglecting 10% or so of your web audience which uses the Firefox browser, does not make much business sense, particularly when you want to establish credibility in a new business.

Jupiter Research reports that one in seven consumer-facing web sites has an error on their home page severe enough to cause visitor defection. Jakob Nielsen reports in his article “Ten Most Violated Homepage Design Guidelines” that about two-thirds of corporate sites violate the usable design principles they are familiar with. This is both good and bad news for small businesses’ websites. More importantly, this is a free lesson for anyone with striving for professional web presence!

The bad news is that if big companies are not able to fix their websites, we should not expect better from the web presence of smaller organizations. The good news is that on the web it is difficult to tell the difference in the size of the company just by looking at its website. It gives hope for those who do invest in web site optimization and usability improvements. A small site can be fixed easier than a large one. Postponing is not an option. By fixing your site you have a chance to stand up among the crowd of broken-linked big corporate sites.

Jupiter Research published a report based on a December 2003 survey of 239 well-known consumer-facing Web sites during which some 22,000 links were spidered and evaluated. “Managing Web Site Quality: Stanching Customer Defection” reports that one in seven consumer-facing Web sites had prominent errors on their home pages. Among the most common problems were broken links (“404″ errors), server errors, nonexistent host names, and servers responding with server unavailable errors.

Further, Jupiter Research singles out improving site usability as the number one challenge faced by Web site operators. This is significant as it outweighs the challenge of budget constraints or measuring ROI.

Usability is more than fixing broken links, but fixing first things first is an important step in the right direction. These lessons are universal regardless of the size of the business — anyone presented on the web should carefully consider their priorities, and if customer satisfaction and user experience of any importance, should initiate a plan for deploying web analytics solutions, web site optimization efforts, and ultimately usability improvements.