Freescale

Freescale.com

Intended Audience
This is pirmarly a business to business site. Freescale manufactures microchips for other businesses to use in building their products. As such, the primary purchase of the site is to be useful to their customers and potential customers. Secondarily, it is to provide information to investors, the press and those seeking employment with the company.

Usefulness of Content
I have to say that they make it very easy to locate a particular part, allowing searching and the narrowing of a search on many criteria (some of which I am sure you would have to be an engineer to understand why they are important). Easily 90% of their site (and the front page) are aimed at their products and making it easy to find particular ones (out of thousands) and help with deciding on which might best fit your needs. They provide easy links to products by type and by application (what industry uses them). They also put their technical support/documentation front and center, again searchable many ways. Although less prominent, links to the investor and press areas lead to press releases, investment reports, etc.

Consistency of Design
As you would expect with any large corporation, evidently a lot of work went into this site. The theme of the site is consistent throughout, even on the country specific/foreign language areas. After leaving the front page the same primary menus appear at the top and bottom of every page. The content is all on a white background with a muted color palette of greys and blue with color being presented primarily in splash images. I found the grey/light blue text on the white background very easy to read and easy on the eyes.

Ease of Navigation
They have made searching for products very simple and straightforward. Your searches can go directly to a part or narrow it down by its characteristics, the list getting shorter each time you choose another characteristic. I found links obvious, menus straightforward and the top/bottom menus to jump directly to major areas always present (including the typical click on the company name to return to the hope page).

One of the more intersting things is that since Freescale is a global company they have made it simple to locate regional/country specific content with links at the top by country (with seperate links for China/Japan/Korea in their own languanges). Each country site is consistent with the main site and text almost always translated into the native language (with the exception of text in some graphic images and that are the names of products/parts). I have to say I was impressed. It was one of the best and most consistent handlings of having a site in multiple languages that I have seen.

I used to work for Freescale when it was part of Motorola and I have to say I was expecting much worse based on what I ahd seen while I was there. The importance placed on allowing customers to easily find product information is obvious.