10 signs your IR website is *still* bad

The problem with item 1 on the list — using an email form as the only way to contact you — is that it’s horribly impersonal and gives people little confidence their message will receive attention.

Forms, especially the ones that Shareholder.com uses, also are cumbersome and more time consuming to use than normal email. Shareholder.com uses that stupid CAPTCHA code that investors have to input before they can submit their message. Those fuzzy letters and numbers are bad because they aren’t there for the good of the investor who is trying to contact you. They’re in place to make life easier for the IR department. The IR department makes its problem — spam bots that automatically submit information via web forms — the investor’s problem.

There are other ways to handle the spam problem that don’t make life more difficult for your investors. There is software that filters spam exceptionally well. We use it on this site. It has protected this site from 118,616 spam comments. The software is free.

Finally, email forms make companies look bureaucratic, aloof and unaccountable. They suggest to people that unless they’re an analyst or a big institutional investor, they won’t get answers when they really need them. So they won’t invest. It might only be 100 or 1,000 shares that they’re not going to buy, but multiply that by thousands over time and it begins to add up.

I’d like to see you tell your CEO to his face that you don’t give a toss about someone who wants to buy his company’s stock. Actually, he can probably see that already on your contacts page.

Beth,

Thanks for asking. It’s one of the more interesting signs of an outdated site.

Basically, if you’re not using the “strong” attribute it probably means you’re not writing HTML. “Strong” is the attribute for bolding text in HTML. And if you’re not writing basic HTML, then you’re probably not engaged enough in your site’s content.

Although you might think it’s obscure, millions of people know what “strong” means because they’re using it on their own blogs or profile pages or in comments on one of these. So knowing what it does is an indication of how actively you’re participating in the new web.

Using bold text is also important for properly marked up online content. It draws attention to important words. Since most people don’t read online text word for word, using bold text can improve user comprehension and help them find what they’re looking for. You should be marking up all text on your web pages yourself if you’re the communicator.

Finally, you should be using “strong” rather than ‘b’. While they do the same thing, “strong” is more correct. If you’re still using ‘b’, then your site is probably quite old and due for an upgrade.

Carla,

When a company positions stock quotes and charts as the first items in its navigation menu, it is suggesting that this information is a primary reason for investors to visit its website.

But the research — and common sense — suggests that this is very rarely the main reason for an investor to visit an IR website. This is true especially for industry professionals. In repeated surveys with professionals, stock information is rated near the bottom of the things they want from an IR website.

For example, in 2004 a survey by H&H in Europe found that only 9% cent of analyst and journalist respondents said they needed share information from IR websites.

In 2006, a survey by Thomson Financial of US and Canadian analysts found that only 6% said stock information was important to them. And there are many other surveys that find the same thing, but I’m using these two to show it applies in the US and Europe.

But what about retail investors? The same holds true, but not to the same extent as investment professionals. An IR Magazine survey with US retail investors found that 54% of retail investors used stock quotes on IR websites, but this was one of the three least important information items. In a 2004 study with retail investors conducted by Real World Investor, 45% said they thought share price information was important, but 19% said it was not and 36% said they were “not really important, but nice to have.”

So while stock prices obviously matter and are important to investors for their investment returns, they are not typically a primary reason for them to visit companies’ websites. This makes a lot of sense, of course, given how easy it is to get stock quote information on the web from free financial portals and from online brokerage firms and other sources. And rather than having to visit multiple corporate sites for quotes, investors can get quotes for all their companies in one place, so it’s more convenient to use another source. If there is an exception to this, it might be Japan and some other Asian markets, but even that has changed a lot.

Therefore, placing stock quotes and charts as the first or second section on your site shows that you don’t know any of this and haven’t thought carefully about why people are coming to your site. And since a good website must be built around user motives, chances are your site sucks in more ways than just this if you haven’t done the basic thinking about your site’s users.

But it is important to note that stock quotes and especially charts are still essential content on an IR website. You should not go without them, but they shouldn’t be the most prominent things on the site.

There is more I could talk about here in terms of when stock charts are important to investors, and also why you need to be careful of counting quote “hits,” but I think I’ve answered your question.