Client Context
The head of corporate eBusiness at one of the world's leading retail companies had a difficult task ahead of him: He wanted to standardize the level of quality of all corporate Web sites and intranets, while at the same time making room for unique, creative approaches on various brand-, regional- and country-specific Web sites. The corporate Web standards needed to provide:

• Site owners a plan for effectively redesigning their sites to conform to the standardized level of corporate quality
• Future site owners a plan for effectively developing their sites.

Why an external usability expert?
Corporate Web standards must incorporate a number of components, including usability, navigation concepts and page layouts. And, if these standards are to be adopted across the corporation, eBusiness must "sell" the Web standards internally to current site owners, business owners and IT. Because he was aware of all these issues, the head of corporate eBusiness looked for an external partner who could provide:

• Proven industry experience in Web and intranet design,
• Extensive experience in facilitating workshops to gain buy-in by corporate Web teams
• The unbiased advice that can only come from a company that does not depend on potential implementation revenue. Because we are not in the implementation business, we have only our client's best interest at-heart.

We were chosen for our strong and neutral Web site and Intranet design methodology, our worldwide experience in helping companies to improve the effectiveness of their Web sites and our ability to help design teams ensure that a politically challenging project will succeed.

The Engagement
As a first step, we conducted a Web site design best practice workshop with the corporate eBusiness team. During this first one-day workshop, the analyst presented best practices using real-life examples. The morning session was dedicated to helping the Web standards team reach a common understanding about what constitutes effective Web site design. During the afternoon session, we demonstrated our site design methodology by sharing hundreds of usability criteria, which would help the team identify those standards that should serve as the foundation of their corporate design efforts, both currently and in the future. The exercise gave the team members the knowledge they needed to categorize design components in one of the two following categories:

• Standards: Site features to which every site needs to conform, such as link conventions, site support tools, usage of images and contact features.
• Recommendations: Site features that site owners are not forced to implement. This allows site owners to implement such site features with a certain flexibility and creativity, but in a controlled manner. Typically, such features include free choices of color use, fonts and page layouts. However, site owners who do not choose to take advantage of this flexibility can implement these site features based on the proposed recommendations.

Following this workshop, our analysts began to compose the corporate Web standards, while clearly distinguishing between standards and recommendations. The Web standards documents also differentiated between information targeted to business areas and data necessary to IT. The business section of the standards documents deals primarily with site features that address the concerns of business owners, including page layout, navigation concepts and proper use of multimedia elements. To accompany each of the described site features, we provided annotated, real-life examples from our composite of best practices or, if applicable, from the client's sites. The section dedicated to Web developers consisted of a checklist to use in implementing site features. The list helped developers in such areas as online forms, use of date tables and use of HTML tags to achieve browser-independent display of the Web page.

In just two weeks, our Web effectiveness team finalized the corporate Web standards documents, which consisted of a Word document (30 pages) and the related annotated, real-life examples (about 40 samples). These documents were developed to be integrated by the corporate Web team on the global Intranet, with entry points and navigation structure for:

• Business owners who want to develop new sites,
• Site owners who want to determine if they comply with current standards and learn how to repair any deviations,
• Web developers who want to download the checklist to implement site features.

We presented the final Web standards to the corporate Web team during a half-day workshop dedicated to gaining final client approval. Following this approval, a pilot project was chosen to apply the new corporate Web standards, prior to rolling out the standards to all other site owners. The application of these standards on the pilot project was in keeping with our Web Quality Assurance Program, which dictates that the:

• Client Web team should be briefed on best practices of site design, including corporate Web standards, prior to the specification process.
• New site specifications and prototypes should be validated prior to the development process to ensure that the specifications are aligned with the corporate Web standards.
• The new site should be audited against the corporate Web standards prior to the site launch to ensure that specifications have been correctly implemented and to avoid any errors that could negatively impact the site visitors' experiences.

After this first internal success, which reduced time to specify the new site by 50 percent as compared with earlier estimates, the corporate Web standards were rolled out to the major regions. Through additional training, we also gave the Web team the skills/expertise they needed to further explain the standards to site owners.

Client Value
According to the client, the company was able to reduce the time required to establish corporate Web standards by at least a factor of four; initially, the client had estimated that it would need at least eight weeks to develop the corporate Web standards. Additionally, the team was able to achieve a 50 percent reduction in the time to specify the first internal site, when compared to original estimates; that means a savings of four man-weeks, while also maximizing the online experience of the new Web site. The team believes it can now achieve this significant time savings on all corporate redesign projects. Perhaps most importantly, the client realized that, without the intervention of a neutral, outside expert, site owners might never have accepted unified standards.