Posted in Website Design Tips	May 15, 2006

By Kim Mateus, Managing Editor Mequoda Daily and Library

The Hub for Internal Communicators is a membership website with research, information and tools for communication professionals. The product and the audience are identified in the tagline: The most comprehensive resource available for employee communication professionals.

Produced by Melcrum, an information and research company with offices in the UK, North America and Australia, The Hub for Internal Communicators (The Hub) has been online as a UK site since 2005 and launched a North American version shortly after.

Melcrum is wholly owned by founders Victoria Mellor and Robin Crumby and currently publishes a number of editorial journals, research products and workshops, conferences and events. The Hub, which is the most recent addition to the group of Melcrum's information products, has no print version, but is a membership website/resource with a yearly subscription fee of £395/$595 (full price).

The Hub has shown a fantastic aptitude for some of the Mequoda Scorecard criteria. We expect that the well-defined strategic intent, the excellent readability and lovely aesthetics will quickly endear the site to readers. There is also room for growth as other criteria such as content webification, relationship building and brand preference are lacking some oomph. Overall, the scorecard shows that The Hub has a good foundation to serve their audience well, and bring value to English-speaking business communicators across the globe.

In a recent website design review of InternalCommsHub.com, Terri Edmonston pointed out the following website design tips:

1. Internalcommshub.com is a landing page for an unknown user, and a homepage for a current customer who is not logged in. The layout has to balance the needs of two kinds of visitors, and this layout does.

2. How could the site get an A in the content webification category? Here are some examples: expand the content mix with podcasts, blogs and video to bring the content to users in additional channels, and engage the audience more intensely.

3. Facilitating communication between members could directly affect revenues for Melcrum. For example, Melcrum hosts events, and it would be a natural for members to be able to reconnect with other members who they had met in person at those events.

4. The Hub is truly a lovely site. There is plenty of white space to rest the eye and allow users to focus on the content.

5. While a paid membership site does have an obligation to reduce the marketing push because members will expect more content and less marketing, the site design shouldn't make it hard to find other Melcrum products either.

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