“The Nominees are …”
First of all before starting my review, applaud to the MS team for adding this advice section, which I was waiting since days…
This is interesting, some one giving some interesting awards to the best website of the year and it will really be a great piece of inspiration for all the dotcoms.
Now there are some factors which makes it a great website. As a Relationship person who have interacted with International websites guys like the MSN, AOL, for me these are some of the factors which should be kept in mind while giving award to a portal or dotcoms.
The factors on choosing the best websites are:
- Loading :
Its very important for the website to load fast. The customers don’t have the patience to wait for ages for the website to load. This is the first priority because, what’s the use of a great content when the website doesn’t load fast.
- Design
The second most important aspect is the soothing design. Its very important to have a decent design and good use of the International Fonts and most important consistency is needed. Their should not be too much use of colours.
- Easy Navigation
Ease of navigation is most important because the customer should find its way, and by no means should be lost while navigating.
- Content is King
What’s the point , in loading fast, great design and easy navigation when there is no content involved. Its very important that the website should be rich in content.
- Customer Service
This as usual I can’t stay away. Any website small or big cannot forget the customer service because in internet world you can’t keep the customer hanging in air. You need to treat customer as a king.
Bottom line, is treat your customer like a king.
Now based on this, the all time top 5 websites which I have come up in the last 5 years of Internet experience are :
Google.com
Yahoo.com
Mouthshut.com
rediff.com
amazon.com
Now this may differ from person to person, but I feel that you cant generalise a website on the above rankings but needs to be categorised and well why not. I know most of you must be thinking, how can you bring MS in the above listing why not, isn’t it the website loads faster inspite of being rich in content, isn’t it the website has a very soothing design, isn’t the website with a great customer service.
Instead of picking out a single winner, lets nominate the website and you guys choose the winner…Because it was really difficult for me to choose the winners from the below list.
Search Engine
The nominees are: (International)
google.com
altavista.com
excite.com
aol.com
yahoo.com
Indian (Though most use google as their search engine)
rediff.com
123india.com
khoj.com
General Portal
The nominees are: (International)
aol.com
yahoo.com
msn.com
excite.com
lycos.com
Indian
rediff.com
sify.com
123india.com
Email
The nominees are :
yahoo.com
lycos.com
excite.com
visto.com
rediff.com
Auction
The nominees are(International):
ebay.com
ubid.com
shopnow.com
auctions.cnet.com
Indian: Does India have a auction website?
E-shopping
The nominees are: International
amazon.com
barnesandnoble.com
800flowers.com
cnet.com
egghead.com
Indian:
rediff.com(shopping)
khuljasimsim.com
sifymall.com
jaldi.com
Apart from this there are many categories which can be given but the space provided doesn’t allow me to go ahead and hence would like to stop myself here and let your thinking process to decide the best of these.
Happy Surfing ...!!!