The right corporate website not only gives the right information to the visitor. It creates the right mood for the visitor, conveys the philosophy of the brand, creates the first impression of the company.
Alas, sometimes the corporate website of the brand – just a given “era of the Internet”. How to turn this need into a tool that will attract customers, improve the image of the company, attract investors and potential employees? Let’s work it out together.
Tonight’s on the menu:
- Why not create a website as long as it is
- What is the evil of CMS systems
- How to please everyone on the site (Spoiler: none)
- 5 principles of developing a cool corporate website
Development of a corporate website: what are the nuances
Creating a “just to be” website
Make me a website. Why? Yes, I do not know why. Well, there is a business. So, let there be a site.
Sad, and, unfortunately, quite a common story. It produces empty, useless sites with cliches about the “production of products using modern technology and innovation.
Steve Jobs has always asked himself and his employees: “Why? And you ask yourself: “Why do I need a corporate website? Think carefully about what goals your resource should meet.
For example, most often the site of the brand fulfills such goals:
- Generates leads;
- Answers questions;
- Demonstrates feedback and collects complaints;
- Tests demand for new products;
- Provides interaction through a personal account;
- Accepts payments;
- Solves many homogeneous tasks for which specialists would be needed.
A website to please everyone
When developing a corporate website, we ask the client a lot of questions. But one of the first will be:
In response, we usually hear a list of different audiences, from clients and investors to applicants. If you ask, “Which one is the most important?”, clients usually say that they are all equally important.
It is impossible to orient the site to everyone at once. Therefore, it is important to determine who will be the main audience of your corporate resource. Highlight 3-5 most important categories that you will be able to focus on.
For example, if your business is developing on a franchise, it is obvious that you should pay attention to the future franchisees. And if you are constantly looking for employees in the sales department, do not hide the page for applicants far away in the depths of the site.
Depending on your field of activity, your target audience will surely have their own tastes, needs and expectations. For example, people who want to buy luxury real estate, for sure not such expectations:
Does this mean you have to ignore all other visitors? Of course not. Your site should be accessible to everyone, but first of all to attract those visitors who are most important to you.
So before you think about the structure of the site, set priorities – segment visitors into several categories and rank them in order of importance for your business.
Usability: No, we haven’t heard
In 2013, the guys from Coca-Cola made a provocative statement: “Corporate sites are dead. And they were partially right.
For many years, the corporate website was the only source of information about the company and the first place people could learn about it. But today’s online site is very different from what it was 10 years ago. The Internet has become much more mobile, social and emotionally manageable.
And, as a consequence of these changes, huge multi-page resources with nested menus and submenus are gone. Think for yourself, how many pages do you usually browse on the company’s website? Surely it is important to you that all the necessary information was in plain sight.
Corporate sites today are not just informative – they are set up to attract, sell and convert. This means that each page of the resource must be created for a particular audience, developed wisely. After all, its purpose – to lead the reader to a certain action.
CMS is out of place.
In Rezart we have been creating sites with admins on WordPress, OpenCart and our own developments for 5 years. But in 2919, we realized that business didn’t really need it.
The main pain in our agency is when clients bring us supercomplex sites and say that they have not understood their CMS. It is especially sad when clients are left “one-on-one” with admins of high complexity like MODx, 1C Bitrix, Drupal.
Usually huge possibilities of editing and changing the site, available through the control panel, are not clear to the staff. And it is not profitable to hire a person who would constantly make changes – he has to pay from $1000/month. So why do you need an admin?
It is much more logical if your corporate site is constantly accompanied by professionals – then they make all the changes themselves, and you only observe the growth of conversion. That’s how it works in our Rapid Site, and that’s how we recommend that you do it now.
How to develop an effective business website
Choose the right contractor
The first and, in principle, the most important step If you make a choice “in the bull’s-eye”, all the other moments in the development team will do for you.
For example, if your site should attract customers and perform KPI business, you can safely remove from your portfolio of interesting studios:
- Holiday and festival sites
- promo-sites for food, drinks, alcohol
- promotion sites
- public resources
- infotainment portals
- all the other projects that didn’t have the main task of “selling”.
In general, the choice of the agency is a separate broad topic for discussion. We promise to tell you about it soon.
Think of a site development strategy
In order to avoid chaos, it is necessary to think through the strategy in detail and follow it before starting development.
Here are the key points that will help to simplify the creation of a corporate website:
- Understand the goals and objectives of the site that you create
- Investigate and segment the target audience (yes, yes, for the second time, this is important)
- Analyze competitors: study their content, track the strengths and weaknesses of their sites, take note.
- Analyze the old site, if there is one. Explore the accumulated data on analytics to understand what to work on.
- Do analysis of your content, for example, in social networks. So you will better understand what is important and interesting for the audience.
- Make a forecast of the return on investment in the development of the site.
And another thing: the site is not a separate product, but a natural consequence of your marketing strategy. Therefore, if you are still not engaged in digital-strategy, you will have to start. For example, you can start by reading our detailed guide on this topic.
Be sensible about spending
And it’s not just about money, it’s about time and power. If your business only starts, and for you to establish a much more important to establish the sale of goods or to deal with supplies, do not invest millions in the development of the site.
The downside of the coin: when the business as a whole is not ready to pay for the development. So there are corporate sites made on the knee by a talented nephew of his wife. Spoiler: they do not bring money. And in general, nothing good.
Better approach to creating a site wisely: study the pricing policy of the market, choose decent contractors instead of unstable team of freelancers. And then your site will really fulfill the goals for which it was created.
Take care of your client
People come to your site to quickly find the information they need and understand it without problems. Therefore, usability is a key point in the development of corporate website.
How simple and clear is the first time the structure of the site? In a logical place are the buttons with a call to action? Does not distract too fancy design from the meaning, which is important to convey on this page?
Usability has a direct impact on conversion: for example, according to Kissmetrics, 40% of visitors leave the site if the page is loaded for more than 3 seconds. And, according to the same study, 44% of users leave the site if there is no clear contact information.
How to think about and improve the convenience of your site, read here. By the way, from the article you will learn why men in the UK rarely use washing machines.
Work on the site even when it’s ready
Everything flows, everything changes. Including Internet marketing trends and tastes of your audience. Therefore, it is extremely important to connect the site with the analyst, track the effectiveness of your decisions and make timely changes.
According to MECLABS, only 52% of companies regularly analyze the actions of visitors and download their sites. So build regular reporting, analyze audience behavior, get better – and your competitors’ audience, who are among the remaining 48%, will prefer you.
What to remember
- The development of a corporate website should begin with the answer to the question “what goals your website will serve”.
- Accurate analysis of the target audience is key to the development. This is especially important in the corporate resource, as you need to cover the needs of several segments of the audience
- Complex cataloguing sites with multi-page transitions are gone. Better focus on a simple structure from 5 to 9 pages
- Are you sure you need an admin? If you are not ready to pay an expensive specialist or to load yourself in the study of CMS, it is better to choose a site without admin and entrust all changes to specialists
- The main thing in the development of the corporate website is to choose the right contractors
- You can’t get a quality result quickly and cheaply. Think about whether you are ready to invest in the development of the site now? For example, if there is not much money, you can start with our Smart Landing Page and find out whether it makes sense to develop a website
- People are lazy, and every year more and more. Make the site as simple and clear as possible
- It is important to constantly update the corporate website, analyzing the actions of visitors. So you will always keep up with the times and get the maximum conversion.
Yeah, website development isn’t an easy thing to do. But next to the team of professionals it will be a hundred times easier. So, if you are ready to make a super-powerful and cool Rapid Site, where each letter and line of code will be directed to your image and profit – leave a request on our site.