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KPMG: The best global professional services website of 2017

For the 2017 Web Globalization Report Card, we benchmarked the following professional services websites:

  • Accenture
  • Capgemini
  • Deloitte
  • Ernst & Young
  • KPMG
  • PWC

Over the past 18 months, KPMG, Deloitte, and PwC all launched new web designs. In addition, these websites continue to improve in not just creating locally relevant content but promoting this content on the local websites.

This year, KPMG narrowly edged out PwC, based on its very slight lead in languages. Both KPMG and PwC also made it into the top 25 list of best global websites.

Let’s take a look at how KPMG improved its website over the past year, beginning with the new design, which is now fully responsive and globally consistent:

A year before, the website was not fully responsive, and the global gateway relied on a cumbersome pull-down menu that listed all countries, shown here:

The new global gateway could still use some improving. Instead of linking to the full global gateway menu (shown below), the gateway provides a link to a one (or a few) suggested locales. Shown here is what a US-based visitor sees:

And here is what a Ukrainian-based visitor sees:

The goal here is to provide a “toggle” of sorts between languages or related locales. But I’d recommend the toggle be made visible in the header instead. Then you can use a globe icon to link to the full global gateway menu for those visitors who wish to navigate to entirely different locale.

On mobile devices, the global gateway remains in the header — which is excellent to see.

However, KPMG uses a different icon, one that could be viewed as a “location” icon. As I note in the Report Card, this icon is often used to find a physical location, as in a nearby store, so it’s possible that users won’t click on it intuitively to find their local content.

To learn more, check out the 2017 Report Card.

PS: All purchasers of the Report Card receive signed copies of Think Outside the Country, among other goodies.
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Think Outside the Country: Coming April 10th

 

I’m pleased to announce the new book Think Outside the Country: A Guide to Going Global and Succeeding in the Translation Economy, due out on April 10th.

Think Outside the Country is isn’t strictly about taking a website or mobile app global, though you’ll find plenty of real-world examples about how to do just that. Ultimately, this book is about taking yourself global. It’s about providing an understanding of the globalization process along with country and cultural insights so you know what questions to ask when you’re asked to, say, introduce a product into a new market or launch a global marketing campaign.

This book is intended for people who want to help their organizations expand into new markets as efficiently as possible without any embarrassing or costly mistakes. And this book is about showing respect for the people who live in these markets.

You won’t speak every language, understand every culture. And that’s okay. Nobody knows everything. But we can all know a little bit about a lot. More important, we can know what questions to ask. This book will help.

You can learn more here.

And it’s now available for preorder on Amazon.

PS: We will also offer quantity discounts if you’d like to order a batch for your teams.