How to improve the Advertising Week guide and Web site

While it’s top of mind, thought we’d offer a few highly subjective suggestions on how the two main compasses for Advertising Week—the official guide and the Web site—could be improved next year. (It’s not an easy job trying to organize dozens of events into a user-friendly format, and we tip our hats to anyone who would take it on.) But here we go. First, we think the guide needs a table of contents, and even more desperately, an index. As it stands, you never know where you are in the guide until you’re there. Users should be able to, say, consult the index to flip directly to the panel where their boss is speaking. On the Web site, event navigation needs to be easier. As it is now, you can find some events more quickly using Google than you can advertisingweek.com, mostly because the official site doesn’t offer a search box. Visitors can click on a bunch of boxes to have the calendar re-sort, but that’s a pretty clunky way to find something. Lastly, the scrolling events box is still showing events from days one, two and three, which are events under the bridge, as they say. OK, we’re done now.

—Posted by Catharine P. Taylor

September 29, 2005 | Permalink