February 03, 2003
Review of netIQ Web Site
Home page content is centered, and effectively presents the information with out losing the user by forcing liquidity onto the home page, keeps from moving elements around, and helps retain the layout of a very full page while making an attractive presentation.
The home page minimizes the main navigation bar, and looks as thought there is too much information being crammed into too small of a space. Included in the banner the netIQ logo and tagline feel cramped into the space, giving the impression that this may be some type of portal site where netIQ is a secondary brand to the page, and of less importance, which is certainly not the case. The "about us" navigation item and the "contact us" item are separated by "partners", that seems strange to me, as well as contact us as a main navigation item for a company of this size. Recommendation would be to lose the "contact us" item and move "partners" to the left of "about us". Contact information is well served in toolbars for easy access, and prominently displayed at the bottom of the page as well as in the about us section. The limited navigation choices from the main nav is good, a simple search input box should be available directly from the home page rather than just a search link.
The large image/banner topping the page content uses the large amount of space pretty poorly. The graphic treatment has nothing compelling about it and no strong relation to the content boxes inside. The other issue is that it does not do an overly compelling job of drawing the user in and offering interaction, which seems to be it's main goal.
The three general categories on the home page (News, Product Spotlight, Events) are a decent break down of important areas and they seem to have more than enough content to fill these sections. Some time of color distinction might help separate the content better and help users key into the area they are interested in better on first and then re-occurring visits.
News section on the home page is generally effective, combination of highly important image graphics and lesser important text links is well done, recommendation could be made to include the dates of the news for reference, but that is arguable, based on potential lack of updating, i.e. is it worth it to let the user know that you have not had any news for 6 moths.
The product spotlight area makes me want to see product names highlighted within it to give quick-click direct paths to products via name recognition first and description secondary, but it is implemented just the opposite, with headline titles that need to be completely read and deciphered to find out what products they are talking about. The "WebTrends" area is more in-line with my expectation.
In the events content column the small icons are somewhat useless, they do not help me figure out what I am look at, and seem to be contrary to the actual content, case in point the title "NetIQ Online", Isn't that where I am? On NetIQ's online site, what would NetIQ online be? And why does something called online have a TV as the icon? Then the computer icon is used for both webcasts and other events. All of this negates the usefulness of the icons as a tool and adds confusion. The only value I see here is as a graphic element to separate these items from the rest of the similar looking text items on the page.
The interior pages for "Products and Solutions" and "Support and Services" offer a tabbed interface for navigating the options within the section. The products section does not provide a left nav until the user navigates down to the 3rd level and finds a actual product page, and then the left nav does not reflect what the user has done to get here necessarily, and requires the user to figure it out.
Probably the biggest problem with this site is the actual product pages. Once the user has managed to get there, the smallest, most irrelevant thing on the page is the download a trial button and the view datasheet link, and on some pages to add to the confusion they have a light bulb icon with there tagline that is not a link.
