Summary:
A website's tagline must explain what the company does and what makes it unique among competitors. Two questions can help you assess your own tagline:
- Would it work just as well for competitors?
- Would any company ever claim the opposite?
Well-designed B2C (Business to Consumer) sites can easily explain their products and services in text that is short enough that users will actually read it online. AutoTrader.com, for example, tells us to "Search the largest inventory of cars and trucks on the Internet. More than 1.5 million listings, updated daily." Given this information, most people can figure out what the site does.
Relative to B2C, most B2B (Business to Business) sites sell products or services that are much more complex and have less connection to everyday experience. Summarizing a website's purpose is thus much harder in B2B than in B2C. That's why they pay copywriters the big bucks, or so you would think. On closer examination, it seems that most sites pay their copywriters to obscure the site's purpose rather than state it clearly.
Can you match the taglines with the company they describe? Can you tell which company does what? Is there a difference between these companies? Do you care?
Regarding the first question: the taglines are listed in the same order as the companies above them. But the real point here, as you no doubt discovered, is that these taglines are basically content-free word count. They do nothing more than clutter up their respective home pages.
I (Jacob Nielsen) collected the above taglines... as I prepared to write this column, I more recently revisited the sites and found that CSG Systems had dropped the tagline "Harness the power of convergence." The company is now wisely willing to tell us what they actually sell: "customer care and billing solutions." Much more specific, and thus more likely to harness the attention of stressed-out business executives looking at the homepage in search of products.
CSG Systems, Inc. is a world-leading provider of customer care and billing solutions for the convergent communications industry -- voice, video, and data.Our solutions are:
- Scaleable and Robust
- Modular and Integrated
- Efficient and Cost-effective
Unfortunately, when you read the words, you realize that the company is still paying copywriters to avoid communicating with prospective customers. Note how the "solutions" are robust, integrated, efficient, and cost-effective. As opposed to what? A product that was buggy, fragmented, inefficient, and expensive? Given that a website would never advertise such a product, stating the opposite has zero informative value.
Users decide quickly whether to stay or leave a site. To assess whether your homepage communicates effectively to visitors in the crucial first 10 seconds, follow two simple guidelines.
The experience of looking at a series of related home pages in search of specific information is analagous to walking a tradeshow floor with booth after booth purporting to deliver the same goods/services. How does one tell the difference between the companies in these booths? Who does what? Which technologies would make sense for which type of problem? Which products would fit the budget for which projects? The booths were essentially random designs. While they clearly cost huge amounts of money, they failed to communicate anything distinct/unique to a "tired tradeshow visitor pacing up and down the aisles."
Think about your home page as analogous to a tradeshow booth. Why do you stop at some booths and skip others? And, no: having a live magician is not the answer for your home page. Clearly stating what your company does and why users should care is the way to go.