Websites as dry as rice cakes

When I was working on my 'e-commerce certificate' program at GVSU, I had the most fun doing website reviews. When lining up several sites from the same industry, what works and doesn't becomes very obvious. While its easy to point out what doesn't work, it is a whole lot harder to do it right.

So it made me happy to find the April Assembly Lines column by the editor of Chip Scale Review Magazine reviewing the four websites of the 'billionaire's club' of IC packaging foundries. Ron Iscoff, as a print editor, was looking mainly at overall readability and usefulness of the home pages, but as a marketer my concerns are different. So let me do a quick review of my own, in the order he ranked the sites:

1. Amkor Technology has a tiny logo that looks like an afterthought. Dead center is a graphic that doesn't mean anything with the embedded words "Total Turnkey Technology" and "Quality Solutions"--what waste of prime real estate. The all-caps menu at the top of the page is hard to read, and the fixed-width page feels cramped.
2. Stats ChipPAC site gets hit on by Ron for having just one small picture of their products (and its below the fold). As little content as is on this page, there shouldn't be a fold, but they eat up about 250 pixels at the top with nothing but a logo and menu. The graphic bar at dead center, like Amkor's, is useless. And three fuzzy buttons placed hodge-podge on the page make the page hard to quickly digest.
3. Siliconeware is handicapped by a multilingual site, but gets what they do in that critical center spot, showing large IC chips and the words "Flip Chip Packages" in large type. Now if they'd only be smart enough to make the graphic clickable. So the main content choices given to visitors is just news and about us.
4. ASE Global has a home page built in Flash, which ads no value, just glitz. Despite the glitz, the page is boring and has no central focus. The logo is tiny, and the company description takes three lines of text. The page has a vague cloudy graphic with names of their different companies on it, which when clicked, open that website (surprise).
   

After seeing these sites as a group, it appears that the IC Packaging industry needs websites to share info about the company, and to a lesser extent products. But don't the investors and engineers visiting want to feel like these companies care about their technology and capabilities? Amkor did the best with it's "product showcase", but overall, these home pages seemed as dry and tastless as a rice cake. And if sharing about their company is the primary purpose, why don't I get a stronger feel of branding?

Looks like this 'billionaire's club' is still using brochureware.