I have noticed that many, many websites have menus with headings for “Products” and “Solutions.” I find this curious.

The word “solution” in an IT context is already such a self-parodying cliché that it should be avoided at all costs, but this split is a special sub-category of nonsense. It isn’t just lazy writing, it’s lazy thinking.

I recently carried out a website review for a company that makes website content management systems.

As part of this review, I looked at a lot of their competitors’ websites. Three of them had separate menus for “products” and “services”: Interwoven, Vignette and RedDot.

In two cases, they used “solutions” to mean “ways of using our software in your industry” and in one case “the coolness of our software.” In any of these cases, it is hard to believe that a reader - a prospective customer - would know what the word “solutions” actually meant and what they would see if they clicked on it. This is a failure of communication. As so often happens, IT isn’t hard to understand, it’s just written that way.

I think the problem is that the split between products and solutions represents the company’s view of the world, not the customer’s. It reflects the internal split between product development (who are big into products) and marketing (who are big into market segmentation).

My recommendation is to try to see things from the perspective of the reader. What do they want to know? On the Articulate site, we broke it down into ‘What we do’, ‘How we work’ and ‘Clients’. For a content management company, it might be: our software, our services, how we can help you and client successes. One way to find out is to ask five clients what they wanted when they first came to your website.