Burying the best material
Most IR websites continue to be held back by the legacy of a paper-based approach to disclosure and investor communications. Instead of creating information to take advantage of the electronic medium's opportunities, most sites still function as little more than online filing cabinets for documents originally designed for print.

The result is that useful information is buried in repurposed print documents three or four layers down from the IR homepage. And often they are available only in non-HTML formats or are formatted using unique user interfaces, both of which make it doubly difficult for investors to access and use them.

A better approach is to extract high-demand information from repurposed documents and place it on the IR homepage or one level below. For example, if investors find 10-year financial summaries extremely useful, why not make these accessible directly from the IR homepage, instead of near the back of the annual report?

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