10 Best B-to-B Web Sites of 2007?

Christian Watson Top Ten Lists

BtoB Magazine recently listed its 2007 list of best B-to-B web sites.
Here’s the list of winners (in alphabetical order):

  1. Cintas
  2. Dell – SMB
  3. Deloitte
  4. GE
  5. HP – Support & Drivers
  6. National Semiconductor
  7. Staples
  8. Veritas
  9. VMware
  10. Wells Fargo

It’s hard to comment on whether these sites represent the ‘best of the best’ as I’m not familiar enough with all the sites or the industries they serve.

However, they seem like a pretty mixed bag — certainly from an aesthetic standpoint. For example, does the Veritas web site really deserve to be in a 10-best list like this?

Visuals aside, on arriving at the home page I have no clear idea as to the purpose of the site.

Kudos to National Semiconductor for creating a site that only an engineer could love, and to Staples for putting their users first by placing a veritable link directory at the top of their home page.

I can only imagine what the marketing folks must have said — “But, it’s so boring!”

The article overview page has some good quotes, such as this one on the use of Web 2.0 in business-to-business web sites:

We hear a lot about RSS, and podcasts and community-type features. There’s a lot of hype around these features, so designers rush to put them on a site without taking the time to see if these are the best ways to present content.

So true. But just try that line of reasoning with your internal stakeholders and see where it gets you.

4 thoughts to “10 Best B-to-B Web Sites of 2007?”

  1. Ha! With the possible exception of GE, each and every one of the “Top 10” is crap, unless it’s still 1998?

  2. I think your criteria for “best” and theirs are different, perhaps. These are sites for one business to communicate with another, so the user requirements are probably quite a bit different than for public-facing, consumer-oriented sites. The users for these may arrive there already knowing what the site is for and how to use it, so contextual information and help isn’t as necessary and is just clutter than can be removed. And they may be considerably less concerned about the latest design trends than public-facing sites as well.

  3. I think the top 10 sucks in regards to freelance designers like myself. I would put CollabTRAK.com in the top 10 easy!

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