10 Great Web Sites: USPS

Story posted: September 15, 2008 - 6:01 am EDT   

Each month USPS.com logs about 450 million site visits; of those, about half are from companies taking advantage of the site's many business services.

What a difference a decade makes. When it launched in 1994, the site was little more than a place to get basic information. Today, visitors can do online 80% of what they can do at a physical post office, and USPS plans to take that statistic up to 85%, with recent updates focusing on increasing the number of tasks available online, said Bob Bernstock, president of shipping and mailing services.

"Customers are coming to the site because they are trying to complete a task," said Jane Langdon, manager, Internet channel and solutions. "[In August,] we introduced the ability to rent P.O. boxes online. In April, we overhauled the global international shipping navigation to make it easier for customers shipping [packages] internationally."

The latest design tweak also changed the way users can navigate the site, providing additional real estate on the home page. Before this iteration, everything was displayed above the fold. Now, a feature banner lets visitors scroll through five different products, while additional useful yet less popular links such as Jobs, Forms and Postal News extend down the page, Langdon said.

"Some of the change is based on customer feedback—it was hard to find things. People tell us all the time that they weren't aware of some of the features," she said. "So we pushed to the top those things that are most frequently requested." 

Expert 2¢

Hoa Loranger: USPS.com highly streamlined to the tasks at hand. The home page has a lot of choices, but the options are well-organized into logical sections. In terms of search optimization, they dominate the main terms you'd relate to their service. The site structure is conducive to search friendliness and optimization