Designing a Corporate Website: 101 Guide

There is no doubt that website design is crucial for making a first impression. As a matter of fact, it only takes about 50 milliseconds for visitors to form an opinion about a website.

So in this tiny amount of time, your target audience will decide whether your corporate website feels attractive and credible enough to be worthy of their time.

But designing a corporate website to be effective and serve its purpose is more than just a matter of aesthetics. Besides the first impression, it must give visitors enough good reasons to stay and engage with it.

The article will guide you through essential strategies and tactics to design an effective corporate website to help build your business’s credibility and improve customer acquisition.

1. Start with Planning and Research.

Before you move to the practical part of designing a corporate website, you must take some time for planning and research. But what are some essential steps you need to take?

• Define the purpose of your website. First, you must be clear about what you are trying to achieve with your corporate website. Ask yourself these questions: What are your goals and objectives? Do you want to attract more customers? Do you want to showcase your products or services? Do you want to be seen as an expert in your field? These answers will help you define your website’s purpose and guide its design.
• Determine the message you want to convey to visitors. Your website should communicate your brand identity clearly, highlighting your unique values.  Your corporate website brand messaging should be concise, compelling, and part of your overall marketing strategy. To put this into perspective, remember how everything related to Coca-Cola calls for celebration, joy, and happiness? Well, so does their webpage. Consider what makes your company unique and how to communicate this to your audience effectively.
• Understanding your target audience. Knowing your target audience’s problems and needs will help you design website elements and create content that they will find appealing. So ask yourself – who will visit your website? Will it be your customers? Other businesses? What do you know about them? The better you understand their needs, the better solutions you can offer.

With its simple design, trendy colours, topics, and imagery, Seventeen knows how to cater to the needs and passions of its target audience – teen girls.

2. Choosing the Right Web Platform for Your Website

Next on your list is choosing the right content management platform (CMS). A good CMS will be user-friendly, allowing you to maintain your corporate website without much technical knowledge.

With over 42% of all websites using it, WordPress is the most popular platform, praised for its flexibility and scalability. Besides its capability to simultaneously serve tens of thousands of users, WordPress’s gallery offers over 58.000 plugins to customize your corporate website and extend its functionality. In addition, professional WordPress development services will give your website a professional look and feel, helping you gain the trust of your target audience.

Research and ensure that the CMS of your choice fits your corporate website’s scope and intent. And your budget, of course.

3. Designing Your Website Structure

Designing your website structure is crucial for creating an effective corporate website that will be both user-friendly and engaging. A well-designed website structure will ensure that your visitors can navigate it easily and achieve their goals, whether purchasing, finding the info they need, or simply learning more about your company.

• Start by creating an information architecture that will make sense for your business and your target audience. Try to organize your information in categories and subcategories that help visitors find what they are looking for without a hassle. When navigating your website, your visitors should always know where they are, what is around them, and what they can expect to find.
• Your next step is to tackle navigation. Your navigation menus should be straightforward and intuitive so visitors can move around your website effortlessly. How your top menu, sidebar, or footer are designed can make all the difference in whether your visitors will stay on your website or bounce away to your competitors’ websites.
• Consider content hierarchy. Content hierarchy is about prioritizing information on your website. You must emphasize essential information, allowing the secondary content to take a back seat. That’s why the most important details are usually front and center, ensuring visitors don’t miss it.
• User testing. Sometimes our ideas of good website structure differ from the actual user experience. User testing can provide valuable insight into how smoothly visitors navigate the website. If there are any areas of potential confusion or frustration, user testing will help you identify them.

4. The Power of Simplicity

To be effective and easy to navigate, your corporate website should be clean and free of any unnecessary clutter. This will not only make your website more visually appealing, but it will also make it easier for visitors to find the information they need quickly and efficiently.

That’s why simplicity should always be on your mind when deciding your website’s colour, typography, and imagery.

• Colours help visitors navigate the website, easily spot essential information or calls to action, and grasp the content hierarchy. Your corporate website’s colour palette should align with your branding.
• Similarly, your website’s typography helps you frame the overall users’ experience. Your visitors should be able to read the content on your website comfortably, so the fonts you choose should be easy to read and match your brand’s tone.
• High-quality photos and graphics can make your website more visually appealing and engaging. But, it’s essential to find a balance between using enough imagery to capture visitors’ attention without overwhelming them with visual content.

While a simple design can be visually appealing and easy to navigate, ensuring it effectively communicates your brand’s message and values is vital. Therefore, your website should include elements like your logo, tagline, and brand messaging to create a cohesive and consistent brand experience for users, helping your business build trust and credibility.

Sometimes, finding a balance between brand and simplicity when designing a corporate website can be challenging, even for the biggest brands. For example, Burberry, in just a few years, changed its traditional luxury logo to a modern, cleaner one and returned to more luxurious branding again.

5. Designing a Corporate Website: Ensure a Smooth Flow

For an optimal user experience on your website, you must also ensure a smooth and intuitive flow. To achieve this, follow the tips below:

• Create a visual hierarchy. By using different font sizes, colours, and positioning, you can guide visitors’ attention to the essential elements on the page, such as headings, calls to action, or other details you want to notice first.
• Use negative space wisely. Negative space, or white space, is the area of the page that you intentionally leave empty. You can use it effectively to separate elements and create visual breaks, making it easier for visitors to focus on important content.
• Make your call-to-action buttons stand out. The humble call-to-action (CTA) button may seem like a small detail, but it plays a significant role. Using contrasting colours, bold text, and clear language, you can create buttons that catch the user’s attention and guide them toward the desired action and achieving your business goals.
• Place essential elements above the fold. All the necessary details you want your visitors to notice first should be visible without scrolling.
• Design for speed. Slow loading times can be frustrating and cause visitors to bounce off. For example, 1 in 2 people will abandon a website if it takes more than 6 seconds to load, while more than half of online shoppers expect a website to load in 3 seconds. Using a content delivery network (CDN), optimizing your images, and cleaning up your code, among other things, can help you ensure fast loading times and provide a smooth user experience.

6. Don’t Forget About Your Mobile Customers

At the end of 2023, most of the web traffic worldwide – 68.2%, to be more exact

 came from mobile phones. In addition, more than half of internet users say they wouldn’t recommend a business with a poorly optimized mobile website. 

These statistics prove just how important mobile devices are for your website design. So, if you want your corporate website to be effective and fulfil its goals, you must ensure it caters to the needs of mobile users. 

To achieve the optimal mobile UX, here are some tactics you should implement in your website design:

• Optimize thumb zone. Thumbs account for 75% of mobile interactions, so your website design should address this. All the crucial elements should be in this zone for more effortless scrolling and clicking.
• Ensure the crucial elements are big enough. Even though some mobile devices are small, your critical elements, such as call-to-action buttons, navigation buttons, or links, shouldn’t be. Instead, make them big enough to eliminate the need for pinching and zooming and reduce the fat finger error.
• Clean tab bar. Don’t be too creative with your tab bar. For example, use clean design and names for tabs instead of icons to avoid confusing your visitors.

7.  Address Your Audiences’ Needs with High-Quality Content

Your corporate website won’t be effective unless it has high-quality content that will attract visitors and make them want to stay.

But what exactly is high-quality content?

• It is content tailored to fit your target audience’s needs – it addresses their needs and problems or offers a solution. Your visitors may come to your website in different stages – they may come to learn more about the problem they’re facing or already have a clear idea of the possible solution and are ready to make their purchasing decision. Therefore, you must provide relevant and valuable high-quality content for whatever stage they’re in.
• Make it diverse. Use various types of content to ensure you cover all the grounds regarding users’ preferences. For example, the demand for video content is growing. A study has shown that as much as 91% of consumers want to see more videos coming from their brands. Besides video, you can also use images, infographics, and e-books to increase engagement.
• SEO optimized. No matter how valuable your content might be to your website visitors, they won’t be able to find it if you don’t optimize it for the search engines. We will address this issue in more detail below.
• Easy to read. The way we read has changed significantly. We are now skimming for the info they need rather than reading. Use white space, bullet points, headings, subheadings, bold letters, and skip links to let users quickly grasp the structure and focus on essential details.

8. Optimize for Search Engines

Search engine optimization (SEO) is all about getting high rankings in search engine results. SEO aims to make your website easier to find for those needing it,  helping your business attract more quality traffic. 

This topic is quite exhaustive, as techniques used for SEO are diverse, so we will briefly describe just a few:

• Using relevant keywords throughout your website’s content, meta descriptions, image alt tags, and internal linking will help search engines grasp what your website is about and rank it better.
• Linking to other high-authority websites from your niche can improve your corporate website’s authority and search engine rankings.
• If your business serves a specific local area, you can attract more traffic by optimizing your website for local SEO.
• Having a blog may benefit your corporate website in numerous ways. First, it will provide fresh content you can optimize, improving your rankings. Furthermore, it might help you establish trust and authority in your industry.

Check out our article on WordPress SEO to learn more about SEO tactics that can help you improve your corporate website rankings.

9. Social-proof Your Business

To elevate trust, your website design should incorporate different types of social proof. 

One of the most effective ways is to let satisfied customers talk in your favour. 

Since 95% of consumers read reviews before purchasing, social-proofing your corporate website can significantly boost engagement and increase conversions. For example, you can include testimonials, user reviews, and success stories to demonstrate your company’s expertise and authority in your industry.

But there are other types of social proof you can leverage. Depending on your target audience and industry, an expert or a celebrity can recommend your company, product, or service.

In addition, the number of customers using your service or following your social media account, your rankings, and certificates from review sites in your niche can also serve as social proof you may use to your benefit.

10. Testing, Improving, and Updating

Designing a corporate website is not a one-time event. To stay efficient,  it needs continual testing, improving, and updating. So what are some actions you need to take?

• User testing can help identify areas for improvement and ensure that your website is easy to use and understand and that UX has a smooth flow.
• Keeping track of key performance indicators, such as page views, bounce rates, and click-through rates. Analyzing KPIs will give you a clear picture of how visitors interact with your website. To learn more about the topic, check out our article on WordPress website performance.
• Making iterative improvements based on user feedback and analytics can help you create a website that meets the needs of your target audience.
• Regularly updating your website will help you stay ahead of the competition and continue to drive traffic and conversions.

Designing a Corporate Website: How Do I Create an Effective Business Website?

The odds are that your next potential customer will have their first contact with your business through your corporate website. This might be the only opportunity to engage them with your brand, so you must use it wisely.

By following the strategies and tips above, you will ensure that your corporate website design will not only give them reasons to stay on your website but also make them want to return.