Corporate websites are windows into the bureaucracy

I’ve worked on more than one corporate website (not selling products online) with more than 1,000 pages. In fact, I’ve worked on a couple that have many thousands of pages (now, I’m not cheating: I’m not counting countrysites as one site: these are individual sites in a single domain).

And the pages I’m talking about are static, often with more than 250 words per. Don’t even try to figure out how many words are locked into these virtual corporate mazes.

I’ll grant you, some of the content is archived information (e.g. for regulatory needs) or library content. But the rest of it is just company guff: everything from (un)executive profiles (in sentences not images) to vaguely disguised marketing crap.

Let’s get something straight here: these companies I’m talking about do have review cycles, they do retire/delete content. They also publish far more than they need to.

And I just want to add something else: for some reason, all this content I’m talking about is in words…it’s not flash files or images and video (formerly known as “rich media”). It’s mostly all words.

Bureaucracies are notorious for producing rules, processes and … paperwork. And what happens when bureaucracies get an online channel (formerly known as a website)? They chuck all their rules, processes (or descriptions of them) and paperwork online.

And voilà – serve up one tome of a website that no one in their right mind will want to enter for fear of getting lost forever.

So if you’re a senior executive and you get the feeling that your company website is rather large, ask yourself if you’re actually publishing useful information or just telling the world: “My company’s a bureaucratic hell.”

See…company websites really are a window into the corporate soul.