The Alternate BestWeb 2013 #2

CORPORATE: Formed into a corporation; incorporated: the corporate companies of industrial America.

2. Of or relating to a corporation: corporate assets; corporate culture.

3. United or combined into one body; collective: made a corporate effort to finish the job.

4. Of or relating to a corporative government or political system.

[Latin corporatus, past participle of corporare, to make into a body, from corpus, corpor-, body; see kwrep- in Indo-European roots.]

cor’po·rate·ly adv.

Continuing our alternate BestWeb picks (which we began here -> The Alternate BestWeb 2013 #1, we’re moving up one notch to judge the best Corporate, Banking and Finance institution websites.

This time, we’d like to start by clearing the muddy waters. What exactly constitutes  “Corporate, Banking and Finance institution” website? The Banking and Finance tags immediately bring to mind corporations like Commercial Bank, HSBC, LOLC and so on. What does corporate bring into the picture? By the definition above, that’s literally any company.
Seriously. Use a thesaurus, people.

Ergo, we’re going to chop this category into something saner: Financial services and corporate holdings websites. This means banks, companies with fingers in financial services pie, companies that provide tools and services – like Dialog, for example – and groups of companies operating under one banner. Think HSBC, Aitken Spence, MAS.

Of course, not all these companies use .lk domains – many eschew it in favour of the more international .com domain. When they do, they often tend to be based off poorly modified stock themes. It’s up to us to sweep the web for .lk and weed out the best.

GOLD
BestWeb.lk Pick: www.dfcc.lk
Our pick: www.takaful.lk

Amana Takaful’s website is color-themed, with soft greens, whites and dark shades making it easy to read. It’s well-coded and functional without being too complex or simple, extremely thorough and easy to use.

Strangely enough, we think we understand why Bestweb picked dfcc.lk – it’s one of the few tri-lingual corporate websites. However, multilingualism is not one of the judging criteria in Bestweb’s own vaguely worded list (http://bestweb.lk/index.php/judging-criteria2). Neither does it feature in our design-value-functionality approach.

SILVER
BestWeb.lk Pick: none
Our pick: www.dfcc.lk

Bestweb’s favourite is our no.2. We have nothing against it – the design is decent if a little cluttered, functionality thorough, the color scheme like a tiny slap in the face.

BRONZE
BestWeb.lk Pick: www.mcb.com.lk
Our pick: www.softlogic.lk

Mobile phones or gas? It’s your choice – no, it’s ours, actually. It’s Softlogic vs Laugfs here.. When you get right down to it, they’re both pages with slideshows as their main feature. The sense of distinct design starts fragmenting as soon as you begin exploring. Whereas Laugfs bounced us to a hell of a lot of websites, all with their own themes and templates, Softlogic was sensible enough to keep all their business links within the same site.

Let’s not try to Laugf, okay?

Notable mentions:
NONE. Most financial institutions appear to be living in the 90’s as far as web presence is concerned. Some 25+ websites are complete eyesores.

PS: Hemas.lk looks like a blog. We have no idea why BestWeb gave it a merit. Kindred spirits, perhaps?

*WINNERS RECEIVE PERMISSION TO USE THE README BESTWEB 2013 AWARD GRAPHIC ON THEIR WEBSITE. It’s no big deal, you can grab it off the top of the article. Didn’t win? Talk to us and we’ll let you have that shiny badge.

And that, ladies and gentlemen, concludes issue #2 of our #AlternateBestWeb. Up next we’ll be judging the best .lk Community sites (read: forums) and the best Products and Services sites in Sri Lanka, so stay tuned.