evaluating competitors

There are two ways to size up your competition: financial and functional.

2 ways to evaluate the competition:

• Financial analysis looks at the health of an overall business company size, investors, sources of revenue, and traffic to site.

• Functional analysis looks at what a business is doing on the web how its sites are organized, what features it offers, and how fast it is.

financial analysis

The first way to analyze a competitor is to look at the health of their business: Is it profitable? How stable is the business? Does it have multiple revenue streams? Is its market growing or shrinking? How many people does it employ? Who has the business partnered with?

This is the traditional approach to competitive analysis, which is important in any business. There are multiple sources for the information. If your competitors are public companies, much of this information will be public. Some large private companies may be profiled along with public corporations, on Hoovers.com. But if they're privately owned, you'll have to look harder: Research agencies like Nielsen can offer insight into the size of their audiences and businesses; newspaper or magazine articles may also offer insight, and the site itself may tip a competitor's hand: Corporate pages often include staff directories, lists of partners and investors, and press releases on product releases and corporate earnings.

functional analysis

The second way to evaluate a competitor is to look at its web site and assess how well it's working. This allows you to both understand what you're up against and generate ideas for your own site.

If you're launching a site for your restaurant, for example, look at other restaurant sites. Notice how they're organized and what features they include. Are there standard buttons or headings? Where do they put their contact information? Do they include a menu? Photos of the dining room?

Noticing these details will help you solve the problems on your own site, and it will also help you understand your users' expectations. Often, you'll find conventions have developed within your particular industry (designing for web conventions, p. 84).

It's important, though, that you actually use each feature on these sites, because functionality can be deceiving: Features may work differently from what you assume, or they may not work at all. Features that sound great often fail to deliver on their promises.

It's also important not to get caught up in the bells and whistles. Although they may be fun to look at, the coolest, prettiest sites are rarely the most effective.

understanding your competitors

Not sure how well your competitors are doing?

Here's what to ask:

• How well are they doing? For online competitors, look at traffic levels (How high? Growing or shrinking?) as well as revenue and company size.

• In what direction are they heading? What have they done lately? What partnerships have they announced? What do they emphasize on their front door? What do they downplay? What audience do they address?

• What works well on their site? What do you like about their web site? What seems to be popular? What makes sense to you?

• What are they doing wrong? What's not working on their site? Is it confusing? Slow? Do the features work as expected?

"Whoever is winning at the moment will always seem to be invincible."

George Orwell

action section: how good is your competition?

	Competitor 1	Competitor 2	Competitor 3
Name
Traffic (if known)
Revenue (if known)
Search ranking
Key features
Navigation system
Site search
Email service
Performance Front door K size Front door load time Speed of features
Technical choices