Site Review : Tata Steel

Visit Tata Steel at : http://www.tatasteel.com/

India's pioneer in the Iron & Steel Industry sports a very informative site which gives complete history about its company and founders ever since the end of the 20th century which not many companies in the world would be able to do. The site is VAST and it would take an explorer quite a while to go through the entire site in one go! Every division of the company such as Ferro Alloy & Mineral Division, the Internation Business Division etc all had large information about their activities and were actually Mini-websites within the group's main website.

A good feature about the site is that it is available in dual language, i.e. in Hindi too, however some of the menus are not available in Hindi perhaps because of their focus on the export market and the fact that most of their customer would anyway understand English!

The specifications of the products of the company i.e. Flat Products comprising of Galvanised Coils, Cold Rolled Coils, Hot Rolled Coils & Plates / Sheets & Electrolytic Tin Plate & Long Products comprising of Wire Rod Coils, Rebars, Special Bar Quality, Billets are given in detail in pop-up windows which would make it difficult for those customers wishing to print complete specs of all their product range in one print command. Perhaps they could have considered giving the specs in a similar fashion as the Application of the products so that those customers or dealers wishing to print out their specs could do so easily. Other alternative would have been to make a downloadable PDF file with complete specs.

Some of the graphics work on the site is of world class, as one would expect of a company like Tata to have. However when one clicks on the Network & Research inorder to get the contact addresses of their branch addresses, one is not able to either clip or click on the email address of the office because the addresses of the branches are given in Macromedia Flash format where the designers have not made the email id clickable or the address clipable which would force those wishing to contact their brances to keep the mouse over the red branch indicator button of a country and quickly type the whole address & details by hand!!

One feature on the home page was the pop-up menu with a large number of items which could be clickable only when one points the mouse to the beginning of the cell. If one were to click on the main text of the cell the text would get selected. In older versions of browsers this feature would not work.

An interesting feature is the E-Commerce and E-Sales and E-Procurement section of the site where it is claimed that their vendors or buyers can get online reports or the status of their orders and a wide variety of customised reports from the net, via their SAP R/3 system. Such technologies applied in a company indeed shows commitment to customer satisfaction which is something that other Indian companies must follow in providing on-line information about order processing or other information that the customer normally demands. The only point to note that the designing of this section of the site was out of place and quite elementary as compared to the rest of the site and hence did not match the rest of the site design.

Overall a very good & informative site.