FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE

Easier To Use Websites: Bringing Good Usability To Everyday Sites

New York, NY- July 29, 2002 - (INB) A new service by WebCritica.com offers high-end user experience evaluations to websites with small budgets.

As many websites struggle to survive, one life-saving strategy has eluded many: making the sites easier to use. More and more smaller e-tailers and content sites have come to realize that their visitors shouldn't have to bang their heads against walls when they attempt to find account information, or a site's shipping policy, or when trying to locate a product through dozens of categories. Yet, although studies have shown that websites with good usability sell more products and see repeat visits, smaller sites have few places to turn for reliable advice about their website's usability.

Once only available to companies able to spend thousands of dollars on usability evaluations, a new service by WebCritica offers reports for just a few hundred. WebCritica (http://www.webcritica.com) isn't a typical consulting company, although its analysts have worked for the most prestigious design agencies. In fact, David Tomere, founder of WebCritica, bristles at the term. "We're not interested in developing expensive and cozy relationships with clients, or to upsell them to pricey design services. We want to provide affordable and effective usability reports to anyone who wants one." Indeed, visitors purchasing WebCritica's evaluation services need not speak to a salesperson. Customers order online, and when the evaluation is ready it's posted to their account.

Although once an esoteric discipline, the subject of dry tomes published by academic presses and written by researchers, the topic of usability has entered the consciousness of the mainstream press, as evidenced by recent articles in the Chicago Tribune and the New York Times. Usability has left the lab precisely because everyone with an Internet connection depends on its well-thought out implementation. How easily a surfer can navigate through a website or complete important transactions might be what finally determines whether that website will still be on the Internet tomorrow.

WebCritica's usability evaluations range in price from two to three hundred dollars.

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