Silicon Valley clueless about Web

A lot of people would rather be stuck in a small room with an angry skunk than be placed in charge of creating the corporate website. Where do you begin? What should it be used for? What should you put on it? How do you decide which pages should be connected to which? It's not like I understand this stuff, you may have groaned to yourself. The people who do understand this stuff - the Silicon Valley technology companies which have built the concepts and technologies which underlie the Internet - those are the boyos who really know how to put a site together - or so you might think.

If it's any consolation, a report released last month by Silicon Valley management consultants Shelley Taylor and Associates* indicates that, as Ms Taylor says, Valley executives "don't have a clue" when it comes to the Web. They consistently fail to supply the kinds of information site visitors are presumably looking for, leaving Net surfers at a loss if they want to get information on jobs, download financial and investment information, buy a product, or receive customer support. The information they do supply is frequently hard to access because the site is poorly designed. In order to reach such conclusions, Ms Taylor and Co looked at the websites of 50 of the leading technology companies in the world's white-hot technology region, evaluating them according to 180 different criteria. The report, entitled Missing Links in Silicon Valley, is a follow-up to a similar report on the websites of 100 top global corporations released last February, in which the results were even worse. But not, says Ms Taylor, by much.

"I would have expected greater maturity from the Silicon Valley companies which gave birth to the Internet," she says. "It was so disappointing to see the results of the first study; I was hoping we'd see much better practice. But what we saw was only marginally, but not significantly, better."

The study reveals that despite the scramble for brainpower in the region, only half the companies accept job applications online. Two thirds don't accept CVs, and 88 per cent won't accept cover letters. In addition, 84 per cent of sites didn't list a date with job postings so applicants can't tell how old they are or whether they're likely to have been filled.

Amazingly, only four companies gave the name of a customer contact person on their website. One third do not even give a customer service phone number, and only 28 per cent offer an email contact - and this is on the Internet!

Investors - who are currently barmy about the technology sector in the US - have a hard time getting any useful information out of technology companies as well. Less than a third of sites give the name of an investor relations contact. Only a third allow visitors to request financial information online. Only one in five companies post their annual report online. Remember, these are the companies which are trying to convince the world that the Internet is one of the best tools for providing information to individuals ever invented.

So, who are the good guys? The top 10 sites are, in order, Autodesk, Sun Microsystems, Cisco Systems, 3Com, Quantum, Apple, Silicon Graphics, Oracle, AMD and Broadvision. And down at the bottom of the heap come - wait for it - Yahoo, Pixar, and WebTV. Ouch!

* http://www.infofarm.com

Karlin Lillington is at klillington@irish- times.ie