What did you do on your summer vacation?  Me, I reviewed (together with Lori and Lauren) nearly 3,000 technology partner web sites for two separate clients who wanted to know more about the partners in their program and those who, maybe should be in their program.  When things got a little tedious, I’d call upon my imagination and pretend that I was a buying customer visiting their site for the first time—“Would I buy from this company?”  If I were a customer visiting these web sites, here is my impression of what I might see:

• If the site has 3 different ways to navigate, it makes me think that you may tend to arrive at solutions to make everyone happy vs deciding on one direction. 
• If you stray from standard navigation language (if “About us” is “Our gig”), it makes me think you’ll force new (and maybe unnecessary) components on my project that may not make sense.  Let’s just agree now:  Everyone needs to have “About us”, “Contact”, “Our products/services”, “Our Partners” and “Testimonials” in their nav. (more on testimonials below).
• If the site contains and enormous amount of text, I think you’ll talk too much and too long.
• If you use Flash as your intro page and I have to wait until I can get to the information that I am seeking, well, it makes me mad and quite frankly, I’m not impressed by your fancy.  (Might it beself-serving?) 
• If you convert text to graphics on your site (to excess), you limit a healthy amount of copy/pasting (sharing information) that customers might find useful from your site (like directions to your location).  Also, remember that web translators* cannot translate your site if you make everything a gif or jpg image and you may not get new business in other countries. 
• If you don’t have customer testimonials on your site, you may have no experience at all and I’m not sure that I’d feel confident that you know what you are doing. DON’T OMIT testimonials with real names from your site!!!

There’s much more, but maybe worthy of another post.  Afterall, 2,712 experiences is enough to either make you smarter, crazy or both - but it sure helps to identify trends and personalities. 

What this means for channel managers:  It’s healthy to conduct a site review of some of your top partners.  Get to know them.  You can learn a lot from simply visiting their web site.  And, if you can provide some healthy tips on how to improve their site, you can mutually benefit by drawing more customers to them.   Your interest in them will go a long way to building loyalty.  People love people who love them. 

Call us if you need help understanding more about your partners.  

And, if you request a partner web review project, please bring eyedrops!