The Yeoman team is pleased to announce the 7th update to its Website Best Practice Scorecard. Now in it’s seventh year, the scorecard let’s manufacturer’s and brands compare their websites against 121 Best Practices across multiple industries.
Manufacturers and publishers have a unique challenge with websites. Their sites have to combine sales, operations, marketing, support, and channel programs. These have to be organized and easy-to-follow for customers and partners. Plus they have to be ‘consumer friendly’ and keep up with the latest trends in devices and behavior.
The scorecard was created by Yeoman Technology Group based on an extensive review of the top 500 websites of manufacturers, content/course providers, and publishers. This primary research was then combined with usability studies from leading consulting and analysis firms. The result is a set of Best Practices criteria that are proven elements of successful websites and, in many cases, the expected functions of any professional system. Note that the benchmark does not rate design look, theme, colors, messaging, and etc. These are all specific creative elements that should be driven by your organization’s marketing and branding teams.
This year’s scorecard was specifically expanded in several key areas:
- Responsive Design: Not only are their additional requirements for mobile functionality, a key ‘best practice’ is the overall footprint for desktop viewing. They majority of laptops and desktops are now wider than the standard 960 pixels of most sites. All sites should incorporate this wider screen format.
- Geolocation Options: The ‘find a retailer’ link is dead. The new best practice combines geolocation targeting and interactive maps that help a user find your product. In addition, all products should ‘deep link’ to partner retail sites if applicable.
- Live Chat: It’s no longer a nice option, the best rated B2B and B2C now have some level of live chat available on the site.
- Advanced Analytics: The good news is the majority of sites now have some level of analytics running, the bad news is most aren’t configured properly. Base analytics have always been a part of the scorecard, but this year we’ve added requirements for retargeting, behavior profiling, and socio-economic data capture.
- Privacy updates: Always boring and usually ignored, every site needs to have their policies reviewed and updated for new EU and upcoming US changes.
Yeoman’s scorecard is provided to all existing clients as part of their engagement with Yeoman. Scorecard ratings are available as a stand-alone service for $1,500 to $3,500 per site. This includes scorecard creation and formal report review. Contact Yeoman today for a formal quote and sample.