The Ten Most Important Elements of a Corporate Web Site

By Steven Phenix, ViaMetric Principal

I wrote a post two years called The Ten Most Important Elements of a Corporate Web Site and it still holds up today, perhaps even more so in our Web 2.0 world. With more and more corporations building fancy AJAX applications and user communities, and with more attention being given to citizen marketers, it’s still important to make sure your web site is helpful to old school journalists. To quote myself:

“As we public relations people blithely enter this brave new world of corporate blogging and podcasting, perhaps this would be a good time to re-emphasize some basic ground rules regarding corporate communications and the Internet. Having a corporate web site is now as common as owning a copier or a fax machine. But despite the widespread employment of company sites, the common mistakes I see are, well uh, unfortunately way too common.

“Robert Scoble says, ‘You should be fired if you do a marketing site without an RSS feed.’ And while an RSS feed is by-gosh important, I’d still put that behind the simple matter of making your media contact fast and easy to find. In fact, over and over again, the number one complaint I hear from journalists is that when they’re going 90 mph on deadline, they all too often stop dead in their tracks when they hit a company web site and can’t easily find the press contact.

“That’s pretty basic, right? You would think so. But take a quick gander at the sites of say just the Fortune Fifty and you’ll suffer biblically proportionate great pulling of hair and gnashing of teeth.”

The complete list of The Ten Most Important Elements of a Corporate Web Site can be viewed here.

Two years later, the one thing I would amend is element No. 7. I recommended establishing your CEO and other executives as thought leaders by linking to articles they’d written and listing prior speaking engagements. Now I’d encourage clients to actually let CEOs and other executives credential themselves as thought leaders via a corporate blog. In daily posts you can unleash all their thought leadership, demonstrate domain expertise, educate and entertain your customers–all without a third party journalist coming between you and your customers.

But didn’t I just tell you that your site still needs to be journalist-friendly?

Yep, journalists are still relevant, despite what you read online. (See Topix founder Rich Screnta’s comments at Web 2.0 Expo on journalism: “The Internet isn’t replacing it, it’s destroying it.”) So until the last newspaper gets thrown on the last lawn in America, you should still keep the journos in mind.

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