My blogging friend BL Ochman recently criticized Dell and HP for “hiding in plain sight”, by not linking to our blogs from our corporate home page. She went on to argue that “lawyers, CFOs are other suits” still worry about the loss of the message control and therefore hide it from the homepage.

Although I understand BL’s perspective, I think it is more valid for tightly managed, unique corporate blogs like Dell’s or Southwest’s , where one single multi-authored blog represents the voice of the company. At HP, we have chosen a different approach by allowing any employee to blog on any topic, from Sundance, Corporate Social responsibility, LaserJet or Professional photography to name a few. In our case, search optimization and landing pages become as critical as the often over-emphasized home page. Our readers and customers do not search “HP blogs”, they come across us through searches such as “HP advertising campaign”, “HP green strategy”, “HP blades” and search engines connect them directly to the topics that are relevant to them.

Following BL’s posts, I connected with Nandini Nayak, Director, HP.com Site Design & Research, our resident expert on web experience and usability (Congrats for joining the blogosphere, Nan!) to validate my assumptions. Extracts from our conversation after the jump. Let me know what you think.

#1 – Are we hiding our blogs because we do not trust this new medium?

No. If this were the case we would not make them accessible through search or on our key landing pages like the Servers page where we are linking to the specific topical blog. Blogs are another content type and will continue to grow.

#2 – Why don’t we have a link to our blogs on the hp.com homepage?

A corporate Home Page is contentious real estate and has to be governed carefully so we don’t overload it. For a company like HP that targets multiple segments and with a broad product and service offering, the home page has to work hard to get customers funneled into the right web sections. This is the primary objective of the home page and we continue to try to simplify. We use clickstream data and A/B testing to guide what we place prominently on the HP.com home page to meet business and customer requirements. If users scan the page and do not find what they want, HP.com search quickly gets them what they need. We believe that users tend to scan entry pages quickly to tie their intentions to content and spend time looking around more when they reach a destination page. Important resources like blogs, case studies, product details etc. are best served up on destination pages in context.

#3 – Do you believe that a homepage link would be critical to our blogs’ success?

No. In the relative scheme of things, the home page is but one entry page as users increasingly find us through search engines and enter our site through side doors. The importance given to the home page is over rated. As long as blogs are findable through search and the relevant posts are contextually linked on topically related pages I believe we are okay. Featuring an interesting blog post as part of our messaging strategy on the home page and other entry pages is an option we will use as necessary.

#4 How do you see the future of homepages and landing pages?

Our home page will continue to be very important and will evolve as required by our business. Landing pages will be equally if not more important. They are a special focus currently for our search engine optimization efforts. We have ongoing efforts to monitor and optimize our existing entry pages and to selectively create landing pages to transition users from our interactive and offline marketing efforts into the right areas of HP.com as required.

#5 – Can you share how hp.com is adapting in a web 2.0 world?

Web 2.0 trends like Rich Media and User Participation are already a part of HP.com and will continue to be part of HP.com's transformation in the future. We have robust communities like the ITRC forums that have been active for several years. We have enabled access to rich media through HP-TV and expect to use video and FLASH pieces contextually in more interesting ways to augment or replace static/textual content where relevant. User ratings and reviews are already featured in our Consumer store and we expect to broaden this to other web sections. We have enabled social media tagging at the bottom of several pages so you can link your favorite HP.com content more easily to your favorite social networking sites. We plan to bring greater interactivity to our website and we are studying what content needs to be accessible on different devices. We will also continue to grow our number of topical blogs. Web 2.0 is fundamentally about being more user-centric: our overall focus will be on helping users find HP.com content and services wherever they may be and making the information relevant, engaging and useful.

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