A mile and a half up the road from our office in London is an area - Borough - which has undergone huge investment over the last few years. There are plans for even greater development, including constructing the tallest building in Europe, the Shard of Glass, designed by the man who co-designed the Pompidou Centre, Renzo Piano.

A search on Google for Shard of Glass reveals some interesting things about how brands function online. There is an official site for the Shard of Glass, but it has the unintuitive name www.shardlondonbridge.com and is not to be found on the first page of results. The number one result is a website called www.shardofglass.co.uk. This is the unofficial website for the Shard of Glass, built by James Hatts, the man behind the local community site www.london-se1.co.uk, home of a thriving message board about local issues.

What else is on the Google front page? A spoof website about ice lollies that contain “shards o’ glass”, news coverage of the project’s announcement, a book called Shard of glass, a software company called Shard of Glass studios … you get the picture.

Why is the community site result number one?

• It has an intuitive url
  
• It benefits from a large number of contextual links including links from influential sites like dmoz
  

The community site is number one despite consisting of a news story and little other information. Why is that?

Well, let’s look at the official site. This contains beautiful panoramas of the site, location maps, statistics - a smorgasboard of relevant information.

BUT search engine crawlers see less than fifty words of this. Here are those words:

“Home A Vertical City Timeline Renzo Piano Image Gallery Development Team Contacts Information You need flash to view this. State-of-the-art office space Efficient, flexible floor plates from 14,456 sq ft (1343 m²) to 31,473 sq ft (2,921m²) to let. More info Truly mixed use A truly mixed use vertical city in one building. More info T&Cs Sitemap”

Notice the absence of the phrase “Shard of glass”. Notice the presence of the phrase “you need flash to view this”.

There is no interactivity in the official website, no fresh content, no reason for the crawlers to visit it. (The news page is as invisible as all the rest, and without syndication, noone else will be carrying its headlines). Its links are partly from professional partners and partly internal.

I do not write about this because this corporate site is particularly worse than any other websites. A search engine optimisation expert last week (the largest in the UK) informed us that only 3% of websites are accessible to the search engines. But the two Shard of glass websites neatly symbolise the problems with brand websites. They are too often invisible online because of poor design, and this weakens the underlying brand. The Shard clearly has a community of stakeholders which lives around it, is interested in it, part of which lives at http://www.london-se1.co.uk. If, during the lifetime of the project, there is a controversy about its development, or any issue on which it needs the support of its stakeholders, it has no links with them. It is marooned, isolated. But it doesn’t have to stay that way. The Shard and other brands, can reach out into their communities of stakeholders. To do so is not just good politics, it is good business.