What is Corporate Website Design?
Your potential customers get attracted to your business and its offers not only via your impressive and professional brick-and-mortar offices, well-arranged stores, and successful marketing and advertising campaigns. Research shows that it’s your corporate website design that draws more than 75% of clients to your products and services and helps build up credibility.
Your corporate website is your sales representative. It should attract users, offer them valuable solutions to their issues and needs, and straightforwardly communicate with your potential clients. Therefore, you need to think about how to create the most efficient corporate website or improve your existing one to achieve more conversions. This article answers your questions about the overall purposes of a good corporate website design and how to implement them with the help of corporate web development.
his term means the process of developing a company’s website via back-end and front-end methods, techniques, and software rather than the result of such development. You also need to plan and outline this process in the best way to let your website become the main and most influential part of your business’s online presence.
The corporate website differs from any promotional or advertising developments because it does not describe or promote single products or services but the entire company and brand. You don’t have to outline and use it for marketing your new offers, either. Landing pages will do it instead.
On the corporate website, you will have to describe the company, emphasize its performance, introduce its goals, staff, and social responsibility. You should also demonstrate your company’s advancements and achievements here and its differences from the competitors. Show the benefits and bonuses your potential clients or partners can receive from cooperating with you.
Remember that 48% of customers believe that an excellent website design boosts the company’s credibility. They hate slow loading, so the site should work smoothly or you will suffer continuous yearly losses. Customers and investors like or dislike what they see, so 94% of negative feedback is caused by inconsistent design. In addition, about 65% of visitors want to see the contact information on the homepage to continue dealing with the site. They do not trust the company if they do not see it. That is why designing corporate websites is an accurate and lengthy process, and using the proper front-end software and programming languages, such as JavaScript, CSS3, or HTML5, is a must for every expert developer to make your site connect efficiently with its users.
Invest in design because the statistics say that 73% of companies owe their successful competition to their corporate website. Here the matter of choice arises - whether to use template-based or custom web design. Website building services, such as Wix, WordPress, or Shopify (used for e-commerce projects), offer templates to build a website in a matter of one day or even several hours. You don’t need special coding skills or help from experts here.
However, while using such templates, you may face the biggest disadvantage related to competition. You will not be able to be distinguishable from your competitors. Your web design won’t be unique so potential customers will not pay much attention to your company and pass by in search for something more appealing and eye-catching.
You as well need to launch a well-developed corporate website, optimized for conversions and SEO. Template-based websites cannot provide proper functionality. So, your choice and our recommendation is to cooperate with an expert web design agency or a corporate web designer to create a custom website for your company’s needs, its target audiences, and online growth of your brand. You will be able to communicate your company’s goals, missions, values, and achievements to your potential customers, investors, partners, and shareholders.
In fact, your corporate website does not have to advertise and promote your products and services but to give a lot of educational content to establish thought leadership and recognizability.
What Are the Main Features of a Well-Established Corporate Website?
Web design of a corporate site is constantly changing. Despite the new trends and software, there are specific features to be incorporated into your website to help it become successful. They are the following.
1. A Straightforward Layout
No one is interested in a website that is overloaded with unnecessary elements and difficult to navigate. Moreover, if such a site is loaded, and the process is very slow, only a few clients may agree to wait for some time. That is why it is important to remove all the unessential features and place the most needed elements on the front or in the center. That allows visitors to get more information they have been looking for, and the bounce rate is much lower.
If your users are focused on the values your company brings to them and not distracted or overwhelmed, they will perceive your message sharper and respond by conversions and leads.
2. Smooth User Experience
If your website’s interface is poorly designed and unattractive, the quality of your products and services does not matter much when your potential customer enters the site for the first time. The professional designers prefer using React.js library for JavaScript and its Next.js framework for ensuring and checking the consistency of the site’s interaction with its users on the front-end. This software makes your design user-friendly and prioritizes your customers’ needs as much as possible. The users’ experience, if bad, can harm your company’s reputation.
It is very important to research your target audience to understand what they are expecting from you. You can use this information in the designing process.
You also need a strategy to distinguish your website from competitors’ in the eyes of your users. Remember that most users are looking for:
━ usefulness;
━ emotional appeal;
━ usability;
━ accessibility;
━ localization and navigational opportunities;
━ credibility.
If they find all these things on your website, your company will benefit a lot from this.
3. Easy, Intuitive, and Understandable Navigation
Navigation bars should be well-designed to help your visitors browse throughout the site easily and find the information they need. If the navigation is smooth and effortless, your traffic volume and site ranking will go up. Conversion rates will also increase.
Your designer has to take a lot of care about the back-end features of your project, so using Core PHP as a basic scripting language for it and Lavarel as a full-structured PHP framework for back-end development will help a lot because you need the MVC architectural pattern and other useful tools for efficient functioning of the website.
You will get a well-designed navigation bar that has the following characteristics:
━ just one CTA;
━ stickiness to follow the users’ scrolling down;
━ distinct and unique descriptive labels;
━ contact information;
━ proper ordering of labels and titles in the list (from the most important to least important ones).
The professional corporate website development usually involves the most efficient combination of back-end and front-end features and techniques to boost the site’s efficiency and increase conversions.
4. Persuasive and Attractive Content
After the first positive impression, your visitors may get disappointed with the content. You will be able to set up credibility and partnership ties only if the website content is rich and clear. You need to include the copy, descriptions of services and items you offer,a s well as photos and videos, and, of course, informative blog posts.
Your customers need to learn more about your brand and its specific goals to become its loyal users. The content should also put forward new ideas and evoke discussions, answer the clients’ questions, and ultimately, make your traffic volume more targeted. Use testimonials and reviews to look more trustworthy. SEO is needed badly too because your potential customers have to find your brand somewhere on the Net before they can use it.
5. Optimization of Conversions
If you want to engage visitors and generate more traffic with the help of your website, think about your goals once again. If you plan to sell something, offer a free trial. Your website should work as a seller or company’s agent. Use conversion optimization to turn your current visitors into sales and leads. Optimizing should be implemented with a straightforward scientific approach. You need to know what you are doing for conversions and how you can do it more effectively. That is why it is worth hiring an expert development agency to assist you with the website design.
What’s the Purpose of a Corporate Website Design?
Remember that your corporate website is not a promotional one. Promotional websites developed for some advertising and marketing campaigns look different. They are dedicated to one specific product or service while your company’s website design should demonstrate the benefits of the brand and its advancements.
Therefore, the main goals and purposes of your corporate website should be the following:
━ building up the solid reputation with an indisputable authority in an industry you belong to;
━ showing potential customers your affiliated brands without making a focus on them;
━ demonstrating the scale and growth of your business;
━ explaining the trust-building cases and why the company is worth working for, partnering with, and supporting.
If the corporate website design meets the needs and requirements of such an approach, it will be pretty beneficial because corporate websites are meant not only for buyers but also for potential investors, partners, shareholders, employees, governmental offices, mass media, and even competitors.
How to Develop a Well-Structured Corporate Website Design?
Here we are with the tips on how to make the purposes of your corporate website apparent to everybody who takes interest in the site by following specific steps for the corporate website development.
Any website solutions of yours should perfectly resonate with your target audience and distinguish your company from the competitors. If you hire a professional developing agency or a corporate web designer, be prepared for the sequence of phases involved into the development process. They are:
1. Discovery and discussion on the scope of your project, its goals and target audiences.
2. Wireframing to develop the basic architecture of the website, possibly using PHP and Laravel framework.
3. Expansion of the wireframe with visual elements to complete the site’s overall look and make a mockup.
4. Development of a fully functional website related to the design and its unique front-end features with the newest front-end software like CSS3 or HTML5.
5. Testing and iteration to remove all possible bugs and solve functionality issues.
6. Optimization to search engines to draw organic traffic.
7. Launching with further monitoring, testing and optimizing within the process of site’s operation.
If the process of designing a corporate website follows all these phases, its final product will be an entire success.
Final Thoughts
All in all, the web design of your company’s site should ensure smooth access to it for everybody who is interested, needs it, or wants to use it. They can be your customers, potential investors and partners, stakeholders, and competitors.
Since your corporate website is not initially meant for advertising but for providing more information about your company and brand development, it should be intuitively understandable, easy to access and navigate, full of consistent information, and free from overloading with unnecessary elements.
Now, when you know what to pay attention to while planning and creating the corporate website, you can hire a corporate web designer to help you with the project.
