Text Menu

This site won a 2003 Webby Business Award for marketing and communications. (IDEO [24], Bankrate [3], PeopleSoft [53], and Kidbuilding [31] also won 2003 Webby Awards.) As with Bankrate, the judges celebrated this site's ability to attract readers and pass them through to the corporate site. "Within one year of launch, brandchannel increased traffic to Interbrand’s corporate site from less than an average of 60 unique visitors a day to more than 800 per day – an increase of 1,233%. This is the best kind of capabilities statement. [117] " While the issue of increased traffic is beyond the scope of this paper, brandchannel.com uses different anchor properties than Bankrate to achieve the same results.

The entry to the site could be disparaged on webpagesthatsuck.com [87] as mystery meat (which does not provide the user with an idea of where the anchors lead) as the icons are not labeled and are not truly self explanatory. However, the icons are really just one graphic that leads to the welcome screen--thus subverting a user's expectations that each graphic would go to a different part of the site.

Screenshot used by permission.

The welcome site is expanded to show a variety of anchors:

• A top menu that covers the major portions of the site
• An non-distinguished embedded text anchor for the debate and special feature in the main portion of the screen
• A search anchor and registration anchor at the top right
• A non-distinguished anchor on the text and graphic for brandspeak
• A rollover anchor for the answer to the quiz at the bottom right

Screenshot used by permission.

Nondistinguished graphic anchors are also used throughout the site to indicate content, yet the same graphic on the content page is non-anchoral. For example, this image is an anchor leading to content "brandspeak" on the home page, but on the node for brandspeak itself, the same graphic is non-anchoral.

Screenshot used by permission.