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During 2003, 11 websites were chosen as Site of the Month winners.
Now those 11 have been reduced to just three names.
NorthWest Payroll Services win the 2004 Site of the Year award, while Impact Factory and Payroll World are the two runners-up.
These three were chosen because they offered something unique or because they had that little bit extra that stood them apart from the other nominees. As more and more companies "get on-line", it has become increasingly important to have a clear vision of what your website is hoping to achieve and how it is going to do it differently to your competitors.
NorthWest Payroll Services was a runner-up in last years competition, when it was known as NorthWest Business Services. At the time it was complemented for its welcoming approach and its free distribution of useful information and resources.
12 months on, and NWPS has not lost this focus. Better still, it has continued to develop its website in terms of navigation, presentation and content.
Navigation: The drop-down menu is efficient and allows access several levels down with just a couple of clicks. This is an effective navigation method which is easy to follow without taking up too much room.
Since this website was last reviewed, the menu has also been tweaked to keep a consistent structure throughout the site. In a website of this size, this is an important feature to prevent visitors getting lost.
When you use your own website day in and day out, it becomes difficult to see where the flaws and difficulties will be for new user's. NWPS have taken the time to address this issue, keeping things user-friendly for first-time visitors.
Presentation: Many "corporate" websites would turn their nose up at the basic presentation offered by NWPS. However if these websites checked their own "bounce rates" (percentage of visitors that leave without clicking on any links, usually via the "back" button), they would probably be surprised to note how many visitors won't wait for an image-heavy page to load.
Particularly within this industry, many visitors are using the internet from work on slow machines with a slow connection. Your pages must be relatively small to cater for these users.
Not only that, a clear and friendly homepage with a down-to-earth image is often more appealing than an all-singing, all-dancing homepage which can be, quite frankly, intimidating.
NWPS don't fall into these traps. They also do themselves a huge favour by utilising a homepage where everything is absolutely still. No rotating banners, no scrolling text and no animated images to distract and annoy.
Content: We asked NWPS for a comment on their website. They said, in part:
"Most corporate websites are nothing more than a fancy advertisement for themselves but we, in keeping with the original ethos of the World Wide Web, provide 'free to all' information that includes online calculators to assist small businesses in the running of their payroll.
We aim to build on this by adding more calculators (maternity pay, maternity leave and NMW to name a few), adding FAQ's to all the payroll pages and expanding the employment law summary information and adding new topics. One major area of development will be the adding of links to other sources of similar employment law information for each topic we cover."
A commendable objective, but this is more than just words. The NWPS website is loaded with content.
Fact sheets, articles, calculators and templates are all freely available. It is hard to imagine any payroll or HR employee not finding something of use on this website.
If you work in the industry, visit this website today and bookmark it before you forget where it is.
Congratulations NorthWest Payroll Services on winning PayPerShop's Site of the Year 2004 award.
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For Payroll and Human Resource Professionals
