Hill & Knowlton Site Redesign

Hill & Knowlton Site Redesign, originally uploaded by Porter Novelli.

Hill & Knowlton has just recently redesigned its site. It's got a nice clean look to it; but it's slightly steering me away from wanting the new Porter Novelli site to rely too heavily on the gradients/Trebuchet MS/CSS dropdown interface design standards. They're really just a thin veneer of sophistication on a site that still doesn't have an RSS feed for its news feed; where the blogs are tumbleweed traps; and where the navigation is still present in the print version (even though they have a print media css...)

Also, there's still a huge reliance on Flash. Nothing against Flash, of course (well, nothing I want to go into here) but isn't it just somehow - well - wrong to build a site in standards-compliant HTML/CSS then shove a big Flash movie in the middle?

Again, I can see this coming back to bite us in the tuches later, but they don't appear to have registered their canonical URL. What's a canonical URL? Well, unless your webserver is set up badly, a reference to www.domain.com will normally result in the same page being displayed as a reference to domain.com (your canonical URL.)

To reach H&K's web site you have to type http://www.hillandknowlton.com -- http://hillandknowlton.com just won't get there. This is a schoolboy error that should have been picked up in testing.

Another thing: while Google is picking up their new pages pretty quickly, they don't appear to have mapped their old site structure to their new site structure - so a link in Google's index like: http://www.hillandknowlton.com/index/regions now points to a "page not found" error.

On the other hand, I'm kinda into the whole "no stock photography" thing that H&K's always been into. One of the less-well documented aspects of the Web 2.0 design cliches is the near total lack of photographs -- with designers preferring to use nice vector art instead. I've just had a long conversation with our design agency, the fabulous Wilson Fletcher. One of the things that came out of it was, "if we're going to use photography, we're going to use real photographs, and not stock photographs." Let's see how long that lasts.

What do you think of H&K's site, though? Cool and modern, or a little bland?

Comments

[Brendan]

I think it's quite cool and modern!

I haven't looked behind the scenery, but what I see, I like. I think it's quite effective to have the 'this is what success looks like' case studies on the home page. As a client, I think I'd find that compelling.

I also like the space. Suddenly the Edelman website looks cramped by comparison.

Also, they are *trying* to promote their blogs so at least they've recognised that a) they're important and b) they're probably not performing quite as well as they could. But whether this approach works remains to be seen, when there is so much more their bloggers could be doing (such as posting on a regular basis, for example).

What I don't like, from a design pov, is the wavy line with the navbox. Waves and boxes don't sit well together. 'The wave' is a waste of valuable screen estate. And the colours don't work well either, with *slightly* different shades used throughout.

Regarding stock photography, it's *always* better to create your own imagery. You pay more for it, but you get better value from it too. However, photographs can date a site quite quickly, especially if they show people. That sharp-looking analyst with the Hoxton Fin might have looked the part five years ago but now he'd look a bit of an idiot (ok, more of an idiot).

[Kerry G]

Generally I quite like, though it is a bit too sparse.

One annoyance though - click on the blogs link and it takes you to page that describes the 'collective conversation' platform. There doesn't seem to be a one click route from the front page. Also once you're on the blog page clicking on the logo only takes you back to the main blog page, not the main H&K site.

I do like the inbound/outbound link widget in the right hand column though, that is very nifty.

[Natasha G]

I agree, the site is definitely more modern than it was before this latest re-design and it “looks” much more like it’s been designed for search engines – relatively short, few images and what appear to be some primary key words appearing early and often.

I don’t know if there’s a lot of great content though. You don’t get the feeling that the site is a real “hub” or gateway for the industry. First of all, the news coverage is a little weak. I can’t see “Hill & Knowlton in the News”, only internally generated news about H&K and can’t find industry news.

Also, the site is weak on insights/thought leadership which should be among the most prominent types of content. There isn’t that much breadth and depth to the articles and reports available and some inconsistency, with certain reports available in PDF format and not others etc. There’s also no real clear, coherent organisation of this content – how do you find thinking on specific topics, for example?
The navigation problems Kerry touched on for the blogs also apply to the thought leadership content with the thought leadership content quite deep, i.e, too many clicks to find the desired information.

Overall, there is better design than before but content, navigation and some of the site visibility problems mentioned by Mat, let it down.