Headwinds loom for pharma web strategy

We’ve come a long way since pharma’s websites were “best viewed with Netscape Navigator 1.0” and the web designs that were prevalent way back in the mid-1990s would hurt modern eyes with their lack of sophistication.

Nonetheless, how to best respond to what 30 years ago was still the world wide web remains a question that has yet to be wholly answered. The industry has some pressing new challenges to face in the web space, but many companies also have yet to confront some legacy issues.

Preeminent among these are the huge variety and number of websites that most pharma companies still have. Within a single company these might be in the high hundreds, or even the low thousands, many of which may not be known about at a central level or have no clear strategic intent. Without some serious review or consolidation, this causes significant problems of efficiency, not to mention the negative end-user experiences most of our benchmarks are showing.

YouTube is red, Facebook is blue.

No longer reserved for roses and violets, red and blue are also some of the most widely used colours on the Internet, as shown by a new visualization, with social media sites like Facebook, LinkedIn and Twitter all in the blue corner.

Meanwhile Red, though less popular with social media sites – YouTube being the exception, is still the choice of a number of traditional media outlets, including the BBC, CNN and ESPN.

The analysis of the top 100 brands on the web by the COLORlovers website concludes that blue and red will probably continue to the most popular colours, due to the influence and number of dominant players that use them.