Badly designed press sites won’t get you media coverage

Posted: January 22nd, 2009 | Tags: , | Comments

In the latest Alertbox article the grand old man of web usability, Jacob Nielsen, digs into corporate press sites. His study concludes that the situation with corporate newsrooms could be better.

As 3 studies of journalists show, they use the Web as a major research tool, exhibit high search dominance, and are impatient with bloated sites that don’t serve their needs or list a PR contact.

If journalists can’t find what they’re looking for on a website, they might not include that company in their story. Journalists repeatedly said that poor website usability could reduce or completely eliminate their press coverage of a company.

The study shows also dominance of search in information gathering. Journalists tend to use search as their first step. This is not a surprise at all and needs to be taken into account when designing and creating content for press sites.

Nielsen also hits the nail on the head as he questions the spend on outbound PR when companies neglect simple steps to increase the effectiveness on of inbound PR. Satisfying journalists who visit your website should not be that hard.

  • Amazing that people don't get this yet. It would seem to be lesson 1.

    Lesson 2 could be: apart from corporate sites, journalists are also finding their information from social media sites e.g. Twitter, so good content distribution is important in order to capture this interest :o)
  • Also, I'd like to add that proper permalinks are still a problem with many corporate sites. You need to be able to "trust" the links in a way that they will be there in the future as well, otherwise there is no point in linking to these websites and thus, no point in giving visibility either.

    Relatively simple actually :)
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