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.
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.
Adding these key elements to your corporate web design will ensure that your website is an asset to your company. It’ll prevent your website from becoming an expensive online business card that people ignore.