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Jul
12
Fewer Columns Work Best for a B2B Website
July 12, 2007 | Anita Campbell
According to the folks at MarketingSherpa, you might want to re-do your B-to-B website. Why? Because fewer columns in a B-to-B website work best.
And if you want to make another big improvement, do not block your website with a big in-house ad or graphic smack in the middle of the page (something that B-to-B websites do). Instead, make the graphic narrower. That will allow you to put more navigational links above the fold or as near to the top of the site as possible, another big improvement.
To test their theory about fewer columns, MarketingSherpa actually took the Sun Microsystems website and did a mock-up showing some tweaks:
The left side is the “before” and the right side is the “after.” The tweaks reduced the number of vertical columns from 4 to 3, and moved several items higher up on the page. Then they tested it. The revised format with 3 columns performed better with Web viewers in their test.
I think it’s a big improvement. Too bad that as of this writing Sun is still using its old format, wasting a lot of space.
Says Anne Holland of MarketingSherpa:
“What we found, indeed, and for every single test we did, that fewer columns tended to work a lot better than the multiple columns. Then, people tended to really prefer and find it easier to find what they were looking for when it was fewer columns and there were navigational items well above the fold and their view wasn’t blocked with this big ad in the middle.”
Check out Marketing Sherpa’s report about B-to-B technology marketing. There is a free executive summary and transcript of a conference call discussing the executive summary. There’s an in-depth paid report also.
Comments
2 Comments so far
Anita, has Sun seen this site…I think they need to click on. Liked the “before” and “after” a really big differance.
I like the “after” of the site as well. It moves the links up to the top of the site which is more inviting to the visitor and encourages surfing. Interesting, though. I see many, many sites set up as the “before” style.