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.
|