Some years ago, we were encouraging entries from corporate help desks, and they were lousy sites. So we stopped promoting in that area. But one of our winners this year was an internal site: McKesson. It was a very strong entry, and now I'm seeing really excellent IT sites.

What advice would you give to IT managers implementing or maintaining Web support sites? I never give advice. But there is a need to bring users into the process as much as they can. It's not always obvious what a given site should do. And this is true even on the vendor side. Often, IT has a very narrow definition of tech support, when customers have a different set of priorities. It's dangerous to assume that the IT people know what should be on the site. Users also notice inconsistencies, political issues, usability issues.

In some companies, old-timers know the jargon and shortcut ways of saying things, but those are incomprehensible to new employees -- and they are the people who need to learn this stuff. If they open up a business proc-ess explanation and see nothing but jargon and acronyms, they'll give it up. So it helps to get some feedback from people.

What would you say are the major challenges Web support sites still face? My guess is the big issues over the next few years will have to do with the broad area of usability. I think we've established that the concept works. You don't hear as many people saying, "No one will ever use a Web site for support, because they want to talk to live people." That issue seems to have gone away. Now we actually have the opposite problem of vendors and IT organizations throwing everything onto the Web site so you get these really complicated, hard-to-navigate sites, and that turns people off.

We have to fine-tune navigation to make sure people don't get lost. It's not immediately obvious how huge some of these sites are, but it's not unusual for there to be 50,000 to 100,000 documents, and not just the same kind: You've got documentation, training classes, articles, presentations, stories, patches, diagnostic tools -- it goes on forever.