If you want to develop a website that effectively promotes your brand, you’ll first need to identify the type of website that matches your business and its offerings. Two of the more common business websites include traditional sales-focused websites and corporate websites. Sales-focused websites aim to sell a service or product that a company offers. In comparison, corporate websites are meant to promote every aspect of the company in question, which means that it doesn’t focus on a specific product or service.
Keep in mind that nearly 75% of all customers will determine how credible they view a company based on their website design. If you’ve never designed a corporate website before now, the design principles you should adhere to differ substantially from the ones that are needed for a standard promotional website.
If potential customers visit your website to find out more about your company and what it has to offer, they may never show interest in your brand again if they are met with a poorly designed corporate website. This guide takes a closer look at corporate web design and the elements that should be implemented into every corporate website.
What Is Corporate Web Design?
Corporate web design involves developing and designing a business website that will represent a company online. A corporate website focuses on promoting the whole company as opposed to advertising a product or service. Promotional or sales-based websites are mainly designed to sell products, which means that the entire design will be centered around funneling users to product and checkout pages.
In comparison, corporate websites don’t market, promote, or advertise products. A well-designed corporate website will focus on highlighting corporate news, business performance, social responsibility, and staff members. The reason why you should build a corporate website is to increase your company reputation, display the company’s success, inform customers about products and services, and build trust. While these websites can provide information about products and services, you shouldn’t use a corporate website to focus on your company’s offerings.
How Should You Build Your Corporate Website?
There are many website building services you can use when you want to build a functionality and high-quality corporate website. These services allow you to build templated designs that incorporate some customized design elements and features. The top services at your disposal include:
- WordPress
- Squarespace
- Weebly
- Shopify, which is ideal for eCommerce websites
The most tangible benefit that comes with these web-design platforms is that they are user-friendly while also being relatively affordable. Because they offer a template-based approach, you can design a corporate website without having any coding or web-design skills. The main issue with these services is that your website might not be as customized as you want it to be. Since there are a limited number of designs you can select from, it’s also possible that your website will appear too similar to the competition.
If you want avoid the issues that come with using a web-design service, consider creating a corporate website that’s fully customized and optimized for SEO by requesting the services of a professional web design agency. When you hire website design professionals, you’ll be able to make a website that’s tailored specifically to the needs your company has.
Before making a corporate website, keep in mind that these sites aren’t solely meant for consumers and clients. You should instead consider using your corporate website to talk about your company’s mission, value, and accomplishments, which will be communicated to partners, investors, and shareholders.
What Qualities Make a Good Corporate Website?
If you want to be certain that you’ve made a successful corporate website, there are numerous qualities that you should keep in mind while the design and development phases are ongoing. These qualities include everything from a clean layout to intuitive navigation.
5. A Clean Layout
First, it’s highly recommended that your website has a clean layout that’s free of clutter. When making a corporate website, less is more. Your website should have a clear path of navigation with the most important aspects of the website being placed at the forefront.
The main characteristics of a clean layout include content that’s easy to scan through and fast load times, both of which work together to make sure that site visitors can easily absorb information and engage with the content.
4. An Excellent User Experience
Anyone who visits your corporate website should be provided with an excellent and seamless user experience. Having a strong reputation isn’t enough to satisfy users if they are greeted by a poorly designed interface. If you want to make a design that focuses on the user, their needs should be placed at the forefront of the entire web-design process.
Before you begin to design your website, think about performing extensive audience research to identify what your main audience wants out of a corporate website. The research you gather can be used to inform your future design decisions. The main elements that facilitate a great user experience include:
- Usability – Your site should provide users with what they need
- Usefulness – Your website should be simple to use
- Discoverability – The content on your website should be easy to navigate
- Desirability – All design elements on your site should evoke appreciation and emotion
- Credibility – Users need to trust what you tell them on your website
- Accessibility – Every facet of your website should be accessible by individuals with disabilities
Among the most important elements of any corporate website is having intuitive navigation. Your navigation bar should be properly designed to ensure that visitors can move to different areas of your website in a simple and straightforward manner. It should never be difficult for users to find what they’re looking for. The best practices you should adhere to when creating a navigation bar include:
- Calls-to-action – Your navigation bar should have at least one CTA, which will help you improve your conversion rates
- Stickiness – The bar should remain visible to users even when they scroll down a site page
- Descriptive labels – Make sure that the labels to different site pages are descriptive and easy to understand
- Contact info – The navigation bar should have contact information for your company
- Label order – The most important site pages should be at the beginning of your navigation bar
2. Compelling Content
When designing a corporate website, compelling content is essential if you want users to become engaged with your business and brand. Even if you make a great first impression because of a fantastic design, users only make return visits to a website that offers compelling content. Keep in mind that having ample amounts of content on your website should also help you improve your SEO rankings and establish credibility.
The various types of content you can place on your website include everything from service descriptions and blog posts to photos and videos. The right content can assist you in promoting brand loyalty, visitor engagement, and brand awareness. You can also use site content to promote certain ideas and discuss your business. Blog posts can be used to answer customer questions.
It’s possible to place reviews and testimonials on your website, which is effective when attempting to build trust in your brand. Make sure that your target audience can always find content on your website when using search engines like Google. To that end, you should perform comprehensive SEO, which involves the use of image alt text, keywords, and internal/external links.
1. Conversion Optimization
Corporate websites should also be conversion optimized, which involves generating traffic and converting this traffic into leads who may become return customers. Even if you aren’t trying to sell products with your website, obtaining traffic may be necessary for hiring new employees and building your brand’s reputation.
Once your website is properly optimized for conversions, you should be able to increase sales with the same amount of traffic that you were receiving before the site was optimized. Even though social media ads and PPC marketing have proven to be highly effective, optimizing your website for conversion gives you the opportunity to effectively convert previous traffic into leads, which may eventually turn into sales. In this scenario, you aren’t spending as much money to acquire customers.
Now that you’re earning increased profits, you can use these profits to further invest in advertising or improve your website. Keep in mind that there are many different variables that can alter the conversion rate your website has, which is why you might want to hire a professional design agency for this task.
Designing a corporate website allows you to make a website that properly represents your company and all that it has to offer. While an effective corporate website design can include many different elements and features, the five elements detailed above should help you create a design that garners success.
