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We ran our spiders, two at a time, 24 hours a day for about 10 days. Our target: the Fortune 1000. We wanted to know what the world’s most prestigious companies are doing with their web sites. We not only wanted to know how big their web sites were, we also wanted to know how many bad links and how much stale content existed on each site, among other facts. We also wanted to know what kinds of problems are faced by those trying to administer sites of different sizes. By the time the last process wound down, we had detailed log files for 965 companies.

So what did we discover? Lots of interesting things, best summarized by these three takeaways:

Takeaway #1: Web sites hit critical mass somewhere between 1500 and 2500 content items, then balloon quickly to truly unmanageable sizes.

Takeaway #2: No matter what size a web site is, problems with bad links and stale content are pretty much universal.

Takeaway #3: Web site size and technology diversity are directly related to each other. The bigger the site, the more technologies used.

The Details

Let’s take a quick look at the data table that summarizes our results.

This table’s horizontal axis categorizes web sites by number of pages. I’ve arbitrarily assigned size categories of under 500 pages, 501-1000 pages, 1001-2500 pages, and 2501 or more pages. The table’s vertical axis contains information slots for each of the categories that we found relevant: how many companies had web sites in a particular size range, how many had at least 10% stale content on their sites, how many had at least 10% unreachable (404) page errors, and how many had both stale content and 404s at a 10% or higher rate.

When you look at that first data column, there are no big surprises. The data indicates that nearly half of all smaller web sites have problems with stale content and bad links. This makes sense, as smaller web sites are generally managed without cutting-edge software or processes that would help prevent these problems. Notice that 61 of these company web sites have problems with both stale content and unreachable pages. Looking at the list of these companies reveals a wide range of industries (consulting, home mortgage, energy, accounting, etc.), employee size, revenue, and geographic dispersement, so there doesn’t seem to be any obvious correlation between these factors and the care and feeding of a web site.

When we look at the bigger web sites, however, some things do stand out. Notice that more web sites exist at the 2501+ page size than the two previous size categories combined. This suggests that at some point, web sites hit some kind of critical mass and grow very large, very quickly (Takeaway #1).

In fact, when we break the 1001-2500 page group down into three groups of 500 each, and then keep going until we hit the 4000 page mark, we see this:

This data suggests that once companies grow their web sites to 1500 to 2500 pages, something (entropy? chaos? bad processes?) takes over and the sites start to grow. Very few web sites appear in the 1500 to 4000 page range, compared to those that are 4001 and above. In fact, companies are 30 times as likely to have a sub-500 page site and 9 times as likely to have a 4000+ page site as a 1600 or 2200 page site.

At the high end of our survey, those sites with 2501 or more pages, problems still exist, but they take on a slightly different tone. Instead of the 45% staleness rate, we see 34% rates. This suggests more care taken to keeping content fresh, but 44% of web sites in this size category still had 404 errors higher than 10%. For a 4000 page site, that means at least 400 pages or documents that were unreachable! These companies might have processes and tools in place, but essentially, bad links are a problem for web sites regardless of their size (Takeaway #2).

Although an overwhelming majority of Fortune 1000 companies (76% give or take) have web sites under 1500 pages, a significant number of them (136) weigh in at 4000 content items or more, including some of the most recognizable online brands in the world:

3m.com
adobe.com
aetna.com
amazon.com
barnesandnoble.com
cisco.com
costco.com
hasbro.com
hersheys.com
hollywoodvideo.com
ibm.com
intel.com
lizclaiborne.com
revlon.com
scholastic.com
siebel.com
sun.com
symbol.com
target.com
walgreens.com
walmart.com
wellsfargo.com
wholefoods.com
yahoo.com

What else jumps out? Not as many companies as you think are using key organizational labels like “about us” or “contact us” for their sites. Only 430 surveyed sites are using “about” or “about us” in their linking, and 550 sites are using “contact” or “contact us”. Who’s running site maps? 269 web sites are, which means that roughly two-thirds of the list isn’t using some kind of site map to help orient visitors. These numbers suggest that companies have a long way to go to standardize on common linking strategies that most people rely on to navigate a site.

Out of 965 companies surveyed, 109 are using JSP, 53 are using PHP, and 382 are using ASP. This matches another report I read that Fortune 1000 companies tend to go with Microsoft environments because they can afford the licensing. Of these companies, 117 are using Vignette–the tell-tale commas in the URLs give the product away. Over 90 companies are using XML and XSLT on their web sites, which is encouraging but still far from nominal when you consider how these technologies can make things more efficient. A whopping 517 are using PDFs, so we can safely say that Adobe’s technology has penetrated the Fortune 1000 space to a great extent.

The most interesting thing about the use of technologies? Companies with the biggest web sites mix and match. Cisco.com uses Vignette for some pages, XML for others, and ASP for still others. Adobe.com has Vignette-, JSP-, ASP-, PHP-, and XML-driven pages. At the other end of the spectrum, sites tend to be less heterogeneous. Landolakesinc.com, a web site in the low 100s, uses ASP on 95% of their web site. Swgas.com, another site with less than 150 pages, uses PHP on 90% of their site. The bigger you are, the more likely you are to use lots of different technology approaches (Takeaway #3).

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This article reprinted from the Austin Business Journal

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Whenever I work with clients, I often see teams and groups unknowingly engaged in an age-old debate. Many are concerned with process — the folks with spreadsheets, plans, and a checklist for everything. Opposite them are the talented, visionary folks who see what needs to be done even before it shows up — whether it’s on a checklist or not.

In some cases, these two groups complement each other’s abilities. A lot of the time, their inability to see value in each other tears the team apart, costing firms time and money. Make no mistake, you need both sides of the equation to succeed. Let me give you some examples.

When I worked for a large multinational publishing concern, one manager in another group was extraordinarily gifted at dealing with details. She was meticulous about process, about keeping communication lines open, and about creating the proper boiler room environment that publishing deadlines require.

She did things right, no question about it.

Unfortunately, she didn’t have her eye on the bigger picture. For example, whenever there was a book project that needed lots of art, she was on top of the process for outsourcing art. Every form was filled out, every contract signed and routed properly, and every illustration came back exactly to specification.

She worked closely with legal, manufacturing, and production — everyone was on board, and her project management notes were always crisp and clear. Trouble was, in most cases there was no need to hire an illustrator for every project.

Most of our projects used generic art, and we had untold thousands of images all piled up in a production storeroom. All we needed was a way to index the art so we could figure out what we could reuse. A simple database or spreadsheet could have saved this multinational hundreds of thousands of dollars every year…but we didn’t know what assets we had on hand.

In other words, this manager was obsessed with doing things right instead of doing the right thing, which was to spearhead the building of a simple database to track art.

Several years later, I was working for a multibillion-dollar behemoth that sells networking gear (you work it out). Their publication teams used sophisticated tools like Framemaker, XML, and Documentum. They were doing the right thing, to the tune of 250 staff technical writers producing reams of documentation every month. Consequently, the documentation CD they sent out to customers was filling up.

They were about to go to a second CD, which would add tens of thousands of dollars to the department’s expenses every month. Not good. My assignment? Examine the CD’s contents. Ten minutes after I opened the CD, I realized that there was something very, very wrong.

See, every publication had to contain various icons for “danger,” “caution,” “attention,” etc. Instead of using just one icon for each of these, the automatic publishing system was creating copies of each image for each technical publication.

With more than 4,000 publications using 10 icons weighing in at about 3K each, you ended up with 100 megabytes devoted to these little icons. That’s one-sixth of a CD! Why not just use one copy of each of the 10 icons? Eventually, we tweaked the output down to half a CD without loss of information quality. Five years later, the company is still shipping just one documentation CD.

We were all so busy doing the right things that we didn’t pay attention to doing things right. Again, the consequences would have been very costly.

One of our current clients is doing the right things and doing things right, and they’re reaping tons of rewards. They are a global medical equipment manufacturer. Their problem? They have a global sales force, but they were having a hard time tracking which salespeople had up-to-date marketing collateral.

They were spending a lot of money every year trying to crack this problem.

We built them a sales extranet that they could manage themselves. The marketing staff can build pages, upload PDFs, and digitize sales collateral as needed. They can track which salespersons log in and what they look at — in other words, they have an exact record of who downloads what, so they know exactly who has received the most updated information.

Consequently, this company has dramatically reduced the amount of time and energy devoted to maintain the information needed to drive sales. They’ve also cut their FedEx bill in half because most salespeople now just download a PDF version of the relevant collateral they need for an upcoming sales meeting. Having a click-by-click knowledge of what salespeople have downloaded from the extranet portal also allows the marketing staff to identify what the sales staff is currently pitching. This allows them to get in front of the sales curve by preparing more go-to-market materials to support the sales effort.

They can see the details and the big picture at the same time–they can do the right things, and do things right. It’s a tough act to follow, but being able to work out the details while maintaining a clear overall vision is achievable, and the rewards for many of our clients are amazing. Not only can they cut costs and go after new opportunities, but they can serve their clients, partners, and employees better than ever.

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