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Value of Annual Reports to Individual Owners
Entry Knowledge: For most of their visits, individual owners will have some knowledge of what is contained in our annual reports. However, their knowledge is likely to be superficial. Score: 2 points.

Frequency: We don't expect individual shareholders to make use of our annual reports very often, perhaps two or three times per year. Score:1.5

Importance: The annual report is important, but this is reduced somewhat by the fact that information in it is often old by the time it is made public. Score: 2.

Uniqueness: Our website is one of the only places on the Internet where investors can get our annual reports. If we make them available in segmented PDF form or HTML, they will be even more unique. Score: 3.

The total score for annual reports for the individual shareholder audience is 8.5 points.

Value of Annual Reports to Institutional non-owners
Entry Knowledge: We expect about half of these visitors to have a pretty good knowledge of our annual financial statements when they visit our site, either from their own research or from sell-side analyst reports. However, the other half might well arrive at our site with little or no knowledge. Score: 1.5 points.

Frequency: This audience is likely to access our annual reports online only one or twice. They most likely will also print it out for future reference. Score: 1.

Importance: Since they prefer regulatory filings and also will have access to analyst research, annual reports are unlikely to be very important to institutional non-owners. Of course, from our perspective the annual report is extremely important. Score: 1.5

Uniqueness: Even for this audience, our website remains the most convenient place to access our annual report. Score: 3 points.

Our grand for annual reports with both groups is 15.5 points.

Weighing up the numbers
The above exercise clearly shows that annual reports are more valuable content on our site than stock quotes. In structuring our site, we should ensure that our annual report enjoys greater prominence and is easy for users to find.

That is not to say that you will reach exactly the same conclusions for your website. Much will depend on the specific nature of your investor audience and the priorities of your IR program. In fact, the results for most websites are never exactly the same, though there are many similarities.

The above exercise only assessed two content elements on our site. When developing site blueprints in our practice, we subject every content item to the same tests. And we do so for all audience groups.

Once we have evaluated all the content on the site, our next task is to calculate scores for groups of like content. For example, we will group together stock quotes, stock charts, historical price look-up utilities and investment return calculators, then calculate an average score for the group (i.e. the sum of the individual element scores divided by the number of elements in the group.) The highest scoring groups then get greater priority in our site's hierarchy.

When grouping content, be sure not to mix high-scoring elements with low-scoring ones. Doing so may result in you burying important material that should be positioned more prominently.

You will also find that several content elements end up receiving the same score but cannot logically be grouped together. This is where the practice of prioritizing audiences comes in handy. If two items have the same score, preference should go to the one which receives the highest scores from your priority audiences.

When you finish measuring the value of all content items and groups of items, you will have a good idea of how best to structure your site and navigation scheme. One useful rule of thumb to remember is that users tend to see the first two items in a navigation bar first then skip to the last item. Items in the middle tend to be discerned last.

The content evaluation exercise we've just shown you may seem overly complex and somewhat subjective, but it does give structure to the process of building a user-centered IR website. Without a set process, you are likely to make the same mistakes that many other sites do and end up with a site that has poor user experience.

Remember, too, that defining the most important content on your site is only one step in building a site with good user experience. You also need to consider how best to serve up that content. This is where issues such as page size, file formats and other usability issues come into play.

However, having done your homework identifying your audiences and prioritizing your content, you'll know where best to focus your efforts.