That your coporate org chart is a poor basis for designing a website is well known. Along these lines, companies also frequently underestimate how compelling content needs to be to attract an audience. A New York Times article captures the essence:

A site must have addictive content, said Vincent Flanders, a Web design consultant in the Seattle area who is the creator of Webpagesthatsuck.com, a site that analyzes why some pages do not work. “People must be willing to crawl through a sewer for it.”

“Addictive” is probably the word that creators of content ought always to keep in mind as a minimum for attracting eyes. And the typical corporate lingo, far from being addictive, hardly makes sense.

And then there is the matter of usability. Featured advice from usability guru Jacob Nielson and others:

• “Users spend 30 seconds reviewing a home page”
• Users should see your company’s address and a picture of its location up front
• “The most important rule in Web page design is to eliminate unnecessary design”

Great advice, and it leads us to something that this article does not quite make clear: usability and addictiveness of content are related. As the success of participatory Web-based (”Web 2.0″) applications has made clear, it is the user experience as a whole that must be addictive. Site and page structures should melt into the background in order to reveal:

1. Excellent content that induces user participation (even if the action here is as simple as the making of a sales inquiry)
2. Web-based tools that make user participation completely intuitive and hassle-free (even if the “tool” is as simple as contact information displayed on the site home page)