Sun.com Customer Experience and Stuff: Notes from the Sun.com customer experience team.

Corporate web sites collect a lot of cruft. Put a microscope to almost any company's web, and you will find obsolete corporate data sheets, unused landing pages, obscure stubs that are linked from walled-off gateways.

At Sun, we have a secret weapon who helps us sniff out and destroy this old content. His name is Chuvo.

First of all, you'll need to know a bit about our problem: Sun.com just passed its 12th birthday, which is like 86 years old in web years. At Sun there has historically been a distributed environment for corporate publishing, so we can boast the equivalent of 86 years worth of people writing and posting brilliant content for products, chronicles of industry events, breathtaking descriptions of visionary initiatives, etc. We have discovered all kinds of things in our archaeological excavations through the site, ranging from ancient advertising campaigns, apocryphal product data sheets, and mysterious interactive slideshows of snapshots from bygone industry cocktail parties. Such old content is embarrassing for any site, creates noise in search results, and worst of all fosters degenerate neighborhoods and blind alleys where site visitors become disoriented, distracted, and maybe a little scared.

Here's where Chuvo, our secret weapon, comes in.  Chuvo is a Portuguese water dog owned by Nicole Yankelovich at Sun Labs. About 10 years ago, Nicole posted a dedication to Chuvo on her "people page" at Sun Labs, and promptly forgot about it. But the Internet found Chuvo; on a good month, Chuvo gets 3 or 4 visits completely unsolicited.  OK, maybe it's not a very big number of visits, and that's the point -- we now have this question we ask ourselves about any questionable page on Sun.com: "Does this page even get as many views as Chuvo?" If the answer is "no" then we put the page on a "purge candidates" list. And, if occasionally a content owner expresses alarm at his page being a purge candidate, we can ask him politely: "Um, did you know your page gets beat by a Portuguese water dog?"

With Chuvo as our guide dog, last year we removed almost 20,000 dead pages.

(Oh, then we use a process called "PANOLA" [PAges NObody Looks At] to ferret out the lost sheep pages, but that's a story for another time.)

Tunes: 43: Nada Surf: Concrete Bed

Technorati Tag: Web-Design

Technorati Tag: Design

Technorati Tag: Webpublishing