Fast Company announced The Fast Company 50 for 2009, identifying the country’s 50 most innovative companies.

This is the fifth in a series of quick website evaluations, in which Website Marketing NOW is reviewing the websites of the top 10 of The Fast Company list. Are the websites of these companies just as innovative as the companies themselves? Or not…

Number five on The Fast Company 50 list is Cisco Systems:

Cisco.com Website Strengths

The Cisco.com website has various strengths. Upon landing on the home page, the site visitor is presented with stunning images above-the-fold along with compelling messaging.

The website contains customer-focused aspects which are helpful, such as its “Solutions” tab as the first option in the main navigation. Solutions are segmented according to business area or industry. Further down on the page, site visitors can self-segment themselves according to company size.

The website does a great job in maintaining its customer focus through the segmentation process. For example, if site visitors click on “Small Business,” and then click on the option for “I’m looking for…Solutions,” they are presented with small business specific, tech jargon-free options such as “Work from Anywhere” or “Be More Productive,” etc.

And engagement options abound. For example, within the small business section, site visitors are invited to join the Innovators Forum: “Learn small business best practices from industry experts, share success stories, join discussions on important business topics, and learn about special offers.”

Customer-focused offerings are displayed throughout the site. For example, right in the middle of the home page visitors will find: “Empower students, teachers and administrators with digital media.”

The website is easy to navigate, and contains a plethora of content. What specifically caught our attention was the relevancy of the content — for example, when checking out Cisco’s Business Video Solutions, the site visitor is presented with six videos covering different aspects of business video benefits.

Cisco.com also offers the site visitor the opportunity to customize the experience through MyCisco. It is here that site visitors can setup bookmarks and collaboration environments.

Finally, the site is also teaming with training, education and support resources.

Overall, a solid website.

Cisco.com Website Weaknesses

Although there is a whole lot to like about Cisco.com, the site can be overwhelming. There is so much information throughout the site, and so many options on so many pages, at times it feels like an octopus with legs that keep growing and growing.

For someone who is not quite familiar with their products and only vaguely aware of how their solutions would translate for their business, the site can be quite intimidating.

One effective way to solve this would be to offer an interactive guide right from the home page. A guide that asks what type of business the site visitor is in; that asks the size of the business; that asks about business challenges being experienced; that asks about business goals and objectives.

Through a step-by-step process, the site could hand-hold visitors to the exact information that would help them the most. So, rather than having site visitors clicking endlessly trying to decipher the site, instead the site would provide them with a clear and direct funnel to the most relevant content. This of course would be personalized for every single visitor.

Other sites (e.g., HumanaOne and Olay) have achieved this type of guide, and so it’s not as if Cisco would need to invent new technology to achieve this. All they need to do is put themselves in the place of their customers, and build a guide that walks them through a set of questions as if they were having a conversation in real life.

Check out our evaluations of the organizations ranked atop the Fast Company 50:

#1 Team Obama

#2 Google

#3 Hulu.com

#4 Apple.com

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Related posts:

1. Quick Website Evaluation: Intel.com
2. Quick Website Evaluation: TheFlip.com
3. Quick Website Evaluation: Google.com
4. Quick Website Evaluation: Hulu.com
5. Quick Website Evaluation of Subway.com

Tags: cisco, cisco systems, cisco.com, web site analysis, web site audit, web site evaluation, website analysis, website audit, website evaluation

This entry was posted on Saturday, June 6th, 2009 at 7:56 am and is filed under website evaluation. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.