Think of a company’s assistant or a business development executive that a company hires to work twenty-four hours a day and seven days a week with the sole aim of promoting a brand rather than focusing on its products and sub-products, this is essentially what a corporate website is about.
There is a wide variety of reasons to build a corporate website and by the time you found this article, you already had your reasons for building a company website. To make your website stand out, set clear goals, determine your target audience, and break down how you want your pages organized. You need to come up with the pages you want to have on your website. A typical corporate website will have most of these pages;
- Home
- About Us
- Brands / Affiliates
- Service Information
- Portfolio
- Gallery
- Case Studies
- FAQs
- News
- Upcoming Events
- Testimonials
Now that you are aware of what a corporate website is and the pages to consider creating, you are now perhaps wondering what makes an excellent corporate website. To put it briefly, there are several elements and key features that such a site should possess.
Firstly, it should possess a clean and professional-looking user interface. Website visitors judge a business’ website within a few seconds after landing on it. You must make sure they can like what they see immediately. Provide clean and clear navigation pathways to make it easy for them to find what they want in a couple of seconds. Ensure the site is clean and clutter-free using a classic style or a modern graphic design. Most importantly consider having carefully organized content. This is a company website and the content on it is as important as its design. This is the opportunity you have to tell the company story to the audience and how you want them to perceive you. It is better to write your content professionally but conversational and engaging.
Secondly, the website should focus on educating instead of selling. One of the main aims of a website is to educate. It’s the reason why they have the “About Us”, “Portfolio”, and “News and Events” pages. This sounds contrary to websites that focus on selling products or attracting clients. Most often than not, visitors are on your website to find information, not to purchase something. They want to learn more about your company perhaps one they can work with or invest in. Consider making your site even more informative by including videos that have How-Tos, Podcasts, and blogs that will keep visitors engaged. Include all the information about your company such as all its different offices aside from their physical address. Consider adding photos of those physical offices, contacts, and email addresses. It’s also good practice to tag their locations on Google Maps to simplify navigation. This is very important especially if you work in the service industry.
Lastly, you should easily allow people to explore the possibilities of investing in your company by providing all the necessary financial information on your website especially if you are open to investments. The financial reports should be available to those who need to check their investments for transparency.
Don’t make people think you are a faceless money-making machine even though you are a corporation. Showcase the people who help run the company. You may not list all employees but at least show those holding key positions within the company. Your audience is interested in knowing the people making a difference in the business. This will make your company appear more human to learn about and what it stands for. It also gives your employees a sense of belonging to the company. Since every company is dynamic and is subject to change with the current times, don’t forget to add a career and internship page to attract new talent to the organization. This is entirely up to the human resource team to determine how they want to filter applicants to make the vetting process easy.
In conclusion, there are many design ideas you can come up with to make your corporate website stand out and the purpose of this article was to give you a starting point. The developers of a website can also go an extra mile to link your website to an external site that provides an aptitude test that a potential applicant could compete and pass to proceed to simplify recruitment. As a software company with vast experience in website and system development, we can help you come up with a style that is consistent for your website, make sure that your website pages are responsive on all devices, and monitor your website once it’s deployed online so that you can focus on the essential parts of your business.