Website Reviews 03 Jan

Welcome to the first Digital Strategy Website Reviews of 2009. Four very different brands to review with very different digital strategies. Firstly a brand adjusting to New Year sales (although with deep discounting before Christmas, is there much more to discount?), an attempt by a motor insurer to make their site more of an experience, then an original online experience and finally a brand more associated with offline, bringing great content online. These are four very different digital strategies on show - I hope you enjoy the selection.

Debenhams
www.debenhams.com

Firstly Debenhams a UK retailer who we looked at a couple of weeks ago. This time the retailer seems to have sorted out availability challenges which affected the site before Christmas and moved the focus from Gifting to pure Discounting. The look and feel of the home page is recognisable from the pre-Christmas version but the content is different. The wild range of font styles remains, which I think is a mistake. Consistency is your friend! Still, elements of the design aside, there is stuff to like here. It is enticing and covers their key sales themes (presumably) well. There is easy access to individual shopping departments and the search is obvious.

Very busy design and too many signals, but somehow still manages to remain attractive. Report card might read "could do better".

Cornhill Direct - Household Calculator
www.cornhilldirect.co.uk

"Try to make insurance appealing to our customers" might have been the brief for this one. And good luck. Insurance is one of those sectors that just doesn't inspire us. It's not like booking a holiday or researching a new HD TV. Insurance is boring, let's face it. So it's a bit of a challenge to make the product anything other than a grudged purchase.

So how do insurance companies try to make their products appealing? Well one approach is to create a 'wrapper' for the proposition and turn it into something ... well, shiney. Cornhill Direct have created a Household Economy Calculator which allows you to assess the contribution made by each household member, across a spectrum of household chores, such as cooking, washing and grocery shopping. It's nicely designed (which contrasts with the 1999-esque main site) and is easy to use. An imaginative approach but I confess to feeling "so what" at the end of it. Perhaps adding in some social networking - compare yourself to your friends might have been interesting?

Creating some novel content is probably a good thing for an organisation such as an insurer as there is such competition in Search and Pay Per Click advertising - check out the bid prices for Motor Insurance on Adwords. Perhaps this initiative has giving Cornhill some content variation to use for traffic driving (no pun intended!)

Whopper Virgins
www.whoppervirgins.com

This is a one page site but it creates a lasting impression because of the super-engaging content. It's a single video that tells a story. It takes a very familiar brand - Burger King's Whopper - and manages to do something completely new, which is damned hard with an established brand in such a heavily promoted sector. Creating cut-through for your advertising in this market is very tough to do - check out the me-too advertising format that affects heavily promoted sectors such as beauty products.

In this video, Burger King commission research in parts of the world unfamiliar with burgers and do a taste test against McDonalds Big Mac. It is charming and engaging - a great online experience. By telling a story, Burger King take something pretty tired - the taste test - and transform it into an entirely novel presentation. I won't say any more about it - just watch it.

British Airways - High Life
www.bahighlife.co.uk

A couple of weeks ago I reviewed another BA site - Metrotwin - which is a fantastic social networking site. I don't want this column to turn into a BA love-in but I continue to be impressed by the online execution by BA. Quality, quality, quality. The digital strategy behind BA High Life is very different to Metrotwin but equally well executed.

The great advantage the publishers of this site have is their access to great content. Taking the offline content and re-purposing it for online is a simple idea and well used by publishers but not often as well as with High Life. The layout is quite different to the magazine but the brand is recognisable, taking good advantage of online features to search and navigate through the very wide range of articles. With so many contributors to choose from, it's a great resource for travel information, with a quality journal tone. And the photography is top class.

There is a subscribe section but surprisingly there is no online subscription route - only paper or telephone. One minor issue, in the About High Life section, there is some terrible copy, for example, "Stunning pictures set the scene. Glittering prose draws you in. Insider tips and hilarious anecdotes grab you and won’t let go." Who writes like that? Have you ever been grabbed by an anecdote that won't let go? No, thought not. Just let the articles speak for themselves, the site does not need such awkward self-promotion. Still, a minor quibble - this is a fine online destination.