“About Us” Evaluation: Tempur-Pedic Gets a B

Tempur-Pedic makes mattresses, pillows, and other products based on pressure-absorbing material that was invented by NASA for astronauts in the 1970s and was refined by a team of Swedish and Danish scientists. Sale of Tempur-Pedic products  in the United States was initiated in the 1990s by Bob Trussell, who built factories and an R&D center in Virginia and New Mexico. The company’s main About Us page is here.

OVERALL GRADE: B

Products/Services: B

Tempur-Pedic’s main About Us page is simple but effective: five links (Our History, Our Passion, Recognition, Employment, Investor Information) with a teaser for each, for example, “Our History: Where we came from and where we’re headed.” The left-hand navigation bar offers all these plus a set of “Why Tempur-Pedic?” pages. In addition, the About Us pages also offer a useful feature that’s frequently overlooked: a horizontal menu at the top that allows us to choose among Tempur-Pedic products, at whatever point in our reading they become irresistible. Points to Tempur-Pedic for keeping the product in sight.

The layout of all the About Us pages is well designed, with numerous headings and short, digestible paragraphs. The pages could be even more effective if there were links among them. On the Our Passion page, the mention of Swedish scientists should have a link to the section on Our History that explains how the Swedes were involved with Tempur-Pedic. The warranties and tryout should have links to pages that explain them. The “legendary wine glass commercial” should have a link to the YouTube video of it. If the commercial was so effective that people remember it decades later, why not let new customers see it, too?

On the Recognition page, we commend the use of the logos of NASA, Good Housekeeping, Consumers Digest, and so on. Many visitors who are in a rush will probably see the logo here and not even feel the need to read the words.

 Personality: B

We are bored by Tempur-Pedic’s Board of Directors and Management pages, which don’t offer any sense of where the company’s going or who’s leading it there. But we are willing to ignore that because the About Us pages and the Why Tempur-Pedic pages use the magic word: “our history,” “our passion,” “our products.” “We,” “us,” and “our” are the easiest possible way to give a visitor to the site a sense that the company is run by actual human beings who care about their product and their customers.

 Accessibility: B

Across the top of every page is a navigation bar that includes a toll-free number and a link for retail store locations. At the foot of every page is a link to a Contact page that offers an online form, a mailing address, and several phone numbers, with notes about which to use. None of this is novel, but it’s adequate.

TAKEAWAY

Tempur-Pedic’s content is well presented, but the site could be improved by having more links to its own material.

 Does your Web site’s “About Us” section accurately convey your organization’s history and capabilities? Every two weeks we evaluate one example, grading it in three areas that are key to potential customers: Personality (Who are you?), Products/Services (What can you do for us?), and Accessibility (How can we reach you?). Contact us if you’d like to have your site evaluated—there’s no charge and no obligation.

Today’s example was chosen at random; CorporateHistory.net has no ties to this company.

Happy 500th, Sistine Chapel

My friend Vincenzo Drago, a Louisiana native who lives in Rome, reminded me that Michelangelo's magnificent fresco on the ceiling of the Sistine Chapel was completed 500 years ago. If you think Renaissance Europe wasn't a hotbed of business history, or that the Vatican doesn't understand marketing, think again! The dealings of Michelangelo, his patrons, and his acolytes would make a great cable TV mini-series. I urge you to visit Vincenzo's "Sights of Rome" blog for a post that "celebrates this event with a little history and some curious and interesting facts about the making of this incredible work of art." http://sightsofrome.blogspot.com/

 

“About Us” Evaluation: Lincoln Center for the Performing Arts, Inc. Gets a D

Lincoln Center for the Performing Arts (LCPA) is in charge of artistic programming at Lincoln Center, on Manhattan’s Upper West Side. Every year it arranges some 5,000 programs, initiatives, and events, among them the Mostly Mozart Festival and Live from Lincoln Center. LCPA also plays major roles in arts and education nationwide and manages the Lincoln Center campus that is home to ten resident organizations, including the Metropolitan Opera, the New York Philharmonic, and the Juilliard School. LCPA’s About Us page is here.

OVERALL GRADE: D

It is always a bad sign when the Wikipedia article on an organization is more informative than its own About Us pages. That’s the case with Lincoln Center, on whose website high-tech bells and whistles overpower content. The background of each LCPA page is a full-screen photo of Lincoln Center, over which the text is superimposed in tiny white letters against a semi-transparent black background. It’s difficult to read on screen. When printed out, the text appears in pale gray on a white ground, surrounded by part of the photo: a lot of ink, but not applied to what we need to read. Menus heads and subheads duly appear if we hover over them, but sometimes they overlap, obscuring the choices that are offered.

Products/Services: D

The perfect place to display Lincoln Center’s vast artistic scope would be on the History page. Instead, the history is a series of six separate timelines with over a dozen items each. Every head of the organization is listed, every major building renovation or initiative, every major festival … without a single illustration. There’s no emphasis, no way to know if any of the content is more important than the rest.

To top it off, the History page isn’t available as one of the About Us subheads. It’s only accessible from the footer of the main LCPA page, under General Information.

Personality: E

The Board of Directors and Senior Team are merely lists of names and titles, with no photos, contact information, or links – no sense of where these leaders want Lincoln Center to be heading. Surely LCPA could have found at least one inspiring quote from Reynold Levy, who has been its president for ten years.

Accessibility: D

The Contact Us link at the foot of the About Us page is a drop-down menu, with a link for an online form or a phone number. Oddly, there is no mailing address for the administrative offices of LCPA, and no option for queries from potential donors, media, or researchers.

TAKEAWAY

LCPA’s website fails to convey – either through content or visuals - the excitement of an organization that presents some of the world’s finest art performances. Content is held hostage to chic design that might work in a print publication but is all wrong for the Web.

Does your Web site’s “About Us” section accurately convey your organization’s history and capabilities? Every two weeks we evaluate one example, grading it in three areas that are key to potential customers: Personality (Who are you?), Products/Services (What can you do for us?), and Accessibility (How can we reach you?). Contact us if you’d like to have your site evaluated—there’s no charge and no obligation.

Today’s example was chosen at random; CorporateHistory.net has no ties to this company.

Paper, Because

Tip o' the hat to Domtar and its "PAPERbecause" campaign. It takes guts these days to champion the artifacts of the physical world--but that's where we all still live. I love the text in one of Domtar's ads: "The first book every published was the Gutenberg Bible. Printed in the 1450s, 21 complete copies still exist today, 550 years later." (One is on view, under glass, in the reading room of the New York Public Library.) Indeed, paper is sustainable, purposeful, and personal. It coexists beautifully with ebooks, which have their place as well, but not as art.
paperbecause.com

“About Us” Evaluation: Sullivan & Cromwell Gets an A

Sullivan & Cromwell LLP, one of the world’s preeminent law firms, was established in New York’s Financial District in 1879. It has played prominent – sometimes pioneering - roles in legal matters ranging from railroads to derivatives. Today the firm has over 800 partners in 12 offices in Asia, Australia, Europe, and the United States. S&C’s main About Us page is here

OVERALL GRADE: A

Perhaps it’s those logical legal minds at S&C that make this site so easy to use and so informative: whatever the reason, we are very impressed. Quite frankly, the S&C site stands in stark contrast to minimalist sites of a few other big firms, which show no personality and resemble memos on white letterhead.

Products/Services: A

S&C’s overview is a beautifully concise statement, opening with what they do and how long they’ve done it, then moving on to how they recruit lawyers, who their clients are, and where the company’s offices are. The sidebar menu is a well-organized list: Our Firm (Lawyers, Practices, Regions, Offices), Careers, Alumni, News and Resources (Achievements, News, Publications, Events & Speaking Engagements).

Kudos to whatever extremely intelligent person summarized S&C’s 130 years on the History page. The narrative is focused on what matters to clients: the areas of practice S&C pioneered in and excels in. But the narrative also relates these events to world history, with mentions of S&C’s role in American railroads, the Panama Canal, the Great Depression, and economic expansion after World War II. This effortlessly shows S&C as a long-term player on the world stage.

One of the impressive features of S&C’s About Us pages is the fact that the News and Achievements sections are up to the minute - or up to the week, at least. And not only are they current: every news mention has a page with a summary, and an option to go to the full story online or, for print articles, to download the article in PDF format – with S&C branding. (Here’s an example.)

One of the few pages that could use some tweaking is the Firm and Lawyer Recognitions. We are impressed by the sheer multitude of awards, but some logos, subheads, and/or links are needed to make that long, long flow of text enticing to readers, and to make it easy to contact the lawyers who are mentioned.

Personality: A

Sullivan & Cromwell’s Overview conveys a strong corporate personality, but it’s very easy to go to a page about any partner, and every one of those pages is full of very specific information. The lawyer’s bio is followed by headings for selected cases, recognitions, and community involvement. The sidebar has a brief summary of the lawyer’s specialties, mentions in the news, upcoming engagements, education, and bar admissions. All this wealth of information is laid out so it’s easy to sort through it.

We also like the Alumni Profiles page, which offers brief looks at a few S&C partners who have gone on to prominent positions elsewhere. The alumni offer very personal takes on the company, and the very existence of the page implies that S&C is so well-established and long-lived that it can afford to give web space to lawyers who are no longer with the firm.

Accessibility: A

The Contact Us page (accessible via a link in every footer) is the usual online form, followed by a list of S&C offices and a contact name for those seeking other information.

The feature that earned S&C an “A” for accessibility is not on the contact page, but on the pages for individual lawyers. S&C offers the option of adding a lawyer to your address book by downloading a VCard, which you can then import to your address book. We haven’t seen this option on any other site. We did not realize until we saw it here how very, very tired we are of separately copying and pasting email, phone, and address to our email address book. S&C may not be the first site to offer this, but they’re the first we’ve seen, so they get the “big salad” thank-you.

TAKEAWAY

Sullivan & Cromwell’s site is a reminder that if you’ve got great content that’s well organized, you don’t need high-tech bells and whistles. The most memorable feature about these pages, though, is the level of integration. The History page mentions the firm’s strengths. The Contact Us page mentions the firm’s history. The News  page lets us easily contact the lawyer featured in a given story. The pages for each partner have links to news stories that mention them. This is the way websites should be tied together, and we have seldom seen it done so well.

Does your Web site’s “About Us” section accurately convey your organization’s history and capabilities? Every two weeks we evaluate one example, grading it in three areas that are key to potential customers: Personality (Who are you?), Products/Services (What can you do for us?), and Accessibility (How can we reach you?). Contact us if you’d like to have your site evaluated—there’s no charge and no obligation.

Today’s example was chosen at random; CorporateHistory.net has no ties to this company.