Having a corporate website is no longer an option. Detailing who you are and what you do, your website is as crucial to your brand as your logo is. Having an ineffective website – or worse, not having one at all – can damage your brand perception significantly.
You don’t have to look at many corporate websites to see the one thing they all have in common: they’re boring. In fact, if you can stay awake to read a typical corporate website, you probably have insomnia.
Making sure that you have a proper corporate web design should be a top priority as your corporate site represents your whole organization and is a front for your company’s reputation. Unfortunately, many corporate websites you see online are inconsistent, unorganized and unfocused. In order to make sure your online efforts hit the mark, here are the five key elements we feel a corporate website should have.
Your website needs to reflect your corporate spirit. In colours, structure and writing style, your website could be vibrant or serious, formal or laid back. It must express who you are and fit in with your corporate identity in every sense.
These are some of things to consider when you are building your Website.
1. Consistency with Printed Presentation
By changing your corporate presentation on your website, you are essentially throwing away all the time, energy and money you’ve put into establishing your brand. You want to be consistent with your overall brand to leverage what you’ve built and also make sure customers are aware that it’s the same company they’re dealing with. To do this, you should make sure that your website has the same look and feel, typography, color scheme and logo as all your other promotional material.
2. Quality Content
By setting up a corporate website with basic information about your company, you’re only focusing on yourself and not adding any kind of value to your visitors. By publishing quality content on your blog, you are giving people an incentive to actually learn about your company and come back to your website. You can use all types of content from articles, white papers, audios, videos and infographics.
3. Website Architecture
Navigation and Sitemap Another key element your website needs is good web usability. You should set up clean navigation and build an organized site architecture so that your visitors can find what they’re looking for with ease. Adding a sitemap will also help visitors get an overview of your site while helping the search engines find and index even the deepest of your web pages.
4. Call-to-Actions
You can’t assume that your visitors will take the appropriate action, so you need to provide a clear call to action throughout your website. Tell visitors how to sign up to your newsletter, get them to order a product, or tell them to call your phone number for a quote. The response rate between a web page that has a call to action and one that doesn’t is immense.
5. Analytics
While analytics is mainly used to collect traffic data (referring websites, search terms used, traffic volume, etc.), it is also an important tool in helping you understand user behavior. Studying visitor behavior will allow you to lower abandon rates, provide better navigation paths, improve conversions and help you focus on the most valuable pages of your website.
A Web site is practically a necessity for attracting new customers in today’s marketplace, but many small business owners haven’t made the time or found the resources to create one.
Not yet convinced about why you need a website?
- Normally an offline business cannot offer services round the clock. But if you have a website your service/product can be accessed 24/7. Your company actually works when you are sleeping.
- Your target market is looking for your product online. If you do not have a website, you are losing them.
- People really expect you to have a website.
This is very interesting post. Creating website will help your company grow and be known to others. Having a website makes your company a legit company. Thank you, I am learning!
Great info, thank you!