Rating sites for experience, knowledge and gaining competitive advantage

After writing the Microsoft FrontPage and Adobe Dreamweaver product page analysis, I wanted to criticize negatively some marketing aspects of these sites. Than I realized that this is not going to be as helpful and explaining what I was disturbed about. So I stopped the negative thoughts and tried to see what was really behind the "not so good marketing" seen here. Like other realms of the business, marketing people think that they 'control' the web media. Well, not really control as much as 'need' it more than others. Well, this is not exactly what you see out there. Marketing has its place, and good marketing helps sales, engineering and even customer support. But the web is a media that is needed by all business aspects. Once that proposition is understood and accepted by all parties, things start getting useful to analyze and discuss.

---

So the question of what a good page should be, is restated: What would a good marketing page should be? Ahaa, here we go...

First of all, we could probably simplify things by breaking them into categories. This is helpful because there are many resources out there analyzing, testing and advising you how to 'market' on the Internet. Also, there are non-marketing web and page design experts and more books than you can read in a lifetime. Essentially, we can start working on worksheets and guides to go through the design, creation and integration of a single page. Then move on to the phase of putting together a section or a full product section. Finally, worksheets on specific areas which are general and not necessarily marketing related would be nice to have. This is something I have been looking for in ages. Basically, something to organize our thoughts about how to 'look' and 'read' other people's work. This is specially useful in marketing organizations that continue to improve, innovate and grow their message, content and reach.

---

MS Expression page
One of the first "dividing into categories" step seem to be defining some general page categories. In the software product space, I would categorize pages as:

• Information: product packaging, availability, version, license. etc.


• Sales: product price, order information, channel availability, packaging, etc.


• Technical: product operation, features, capability, use model / demos, etc.


• Support: user support, installation, workarounds, tutorial, specific feature operation, etc.


• Marketing: benefits, success stories, solution-packaging, capability, overview, etc.

These categories apply to what I would call "core content". There are other ways of evaluating product information based on organization, content quality, usability and other general web related subjects. At this point I would point you to the many resources available which address general web information subjects.
      In future posts I will go into the sub-categories of each of these, maybe even update or expand the categories. Eventually, product related information could be

---

Lets start looking at what I reviewed previously and see if the categorization helps simplify analysis and yields better results. Later on we can look at the way others analyze sites and see how categories we use help in designing, writing content and assembling pages for product marketing. So next time... on deck:

• Adobe Dreamweaver


• Microsoft FrontPage


•  - Microsoft Sharepoint Designer


•  - Microsoft Expression Web


• NVu (Open source)


• Netscape Composer (also Mozilla)