Building an enterprise website is challenging. There are many various stakeholders to consult and consider and may be mired in complexity that negatively affects your user experience. We’re highlighting all the main components that enter building a robust enterprise site—one that drives conversions, attracts new business and offers prospective customers valuable information and content.
Most folks know an honest enterprise website once we see it: it’s usually got a clean design and bold calls-to-action; it’s easy to navigate, and therefore the user experience is seamless. But how does one actually build a killer enterprise website?
Knowing an honest site once you see it and putting that into action for yourself are two very various things . So during this post, we’ve put together an actionable, hands-on guide to designing a successful enterprise website.
We’re highlighting all the main components that enter building a robust enterprise site—one that drives conversions, attracts new business, and offers prospective customers valuable information and content:
- Conversion-centric design
- Mobile-friendly experience
- Strong information architecture
- Good user experience design
- Clear content strategy
- Modern design
- Testing opportunities
1) Conversion-Centric Design
Conversion-centric design is strictly what it sounds like: it’s all about optimizing the planning of your site to drive conversions. It’s about deciding what you would like your customers to try to do after they arrive on your site, then filtering out any distractions which may steer them away from that action.
There are variety of the way to drive conversions through site design:
- Make clear calls-to-action: On your homepage, tell your users what you would like them to try to do next, instead of leaving them guessing. Want them to observe your product video? Use a brightly coloured button that tells them to try to do just that. Want them to request a demo? You guessed it—put the ‘request a demo’ call-to-action front and centre. Take a glance at Hubspot’s CTA guide for a few essential tips.
- Use directional cues: you’ll draw attention to those calls-to-action (and to other elements of the page which will drive conversions) by using design elements like icons, bright colours, or maybe animations. Ideally, these directional cues should draw attention without interfering with the remainder of the browsing experience.
- Limit choices: We all know that feeling of decision paralysis—when you’re overwhelmed with too many choices, you’re less likely to form a choice in the least . By limiting the alternatives available to users to at least one or two priority actions, you’ll increase the probabilities that they’ll follow through, instead of ending up overwhelmed by choice. You don’t need to eliminate other choices altogether (try putting the remainder on another page deeper in your site), but it’s an honest idea to streamline the alternatives that users see upfront.
- Be strategic with page layouts: People tend to scan site pages, but they don’t roll in the hay randomly. Their eyes usually follow an F-pattern or a Z-pattern, counting on how an internet site has been designed to flow. Luckily, you’ll control this flow to accomplish your goals, and you’ll cash in on those patterns to strategically place key information and calls-to-action. There are tons of guides floating around which will assist you decide how and when to use each pattern: this and this will get you started.
Of all the ingredients to enterprise website success, this is often probably the foremost important. Since conversion is one among the essential metrics of enterprise website success, embracing conversion-centric design should jump to the highest of your priority list.
2) Mobile-Friendly Experience
We know you’ve probably heard it before, but we’ll say it again: the mobile experience has got to be at the guts of any enterprise site design underway today. Consider a number of the stats that Tyton Media has compiled:
- 62% of companies that designed their sites for mobile increased their sales
- 40% of individuals will choose a special search result if their first choice isn’t mobile-friendly
- 48% of users report that if an enterprise site doesn’t work well on mobile, they take that as a symbol of the business not caring
Beyond these stats, the standard of your mobile experience also has implications for search performance—and it’s not enough to make sure that your site is responsive and call it each day . The Google algorithm now penalizes site elements that bring a poor mobile experience, like large interstitial ads that disrupt content, mobile-incompatible videos, and poor mobile site performance.
So if you would like to enhance the user experience, approach sales, and obtain rankings for mobile device searches, a robust mobile experience is important .
Our guide to good mobile design covers what this seems like in practice. Check it out here.
3) Strong Information Architecture
In essence, information architecture is the way that you simply structure your site content. It sounds simple, but the implications are big: information architecture is the key to helping users find what they’re trying to find easily and quickly. a robust information architecture makes your site easy for users to navigate.
That’s why information architecture is vital to urge the right enterprise sites. you would like your customers to be ready to find what they have without wasting their time, whether it’s a blog post or a product guide. you would like to form it easy for patrons to follow through on your calls-to-action. You don’t want to lose business because site visitors can’t find the knowledge they have. All of that comes right down to navigability.
There’s no one-size-fits-all approach to information architecture: a site is often structured to spice up navigability in a sort of way. Here are a couple of of the foremost common approaches:
- Hierarchical: Hierarchical site structures are widely used on enterprise sites, so your users will probably already be comfortable with them. They begin broad with a home page (or ‘parent page’) that filters down into subtopic pages (or ‘child pages’) that contain more detailed information. If you’re a visible thinker, picture an organizational chart or a genealogy.
- Sequential: Sequential site structures lead users step-by-step along a predetermined path. These are less common for enterprise sites.
- Matrix: A matrix-style structure allows users to settle on how they navigate site content. Instead of building a sequence or limiting site navigation to a hierarchy, the matrix structure provides users with a series of links under topic groups that allow them to settle on where they are going next on the location . Matrix structures also can use filtering options (so that users can sort content by topic, for instance ) to facilitate navigation.
- Audience: These site structures segment content and knowledge by user groups. Think clothing sites that filter items for ladies , men, and youngsters .
- Chronological: Sites with a chronological structure organize content by date—this quiet structure is usually only used for blogs, or for other content-heavy sites.
Usually, an enterprise site will combine a couple of of those site structures. For instance, albeit your overarching site structure is hierarchical, you could possibly plan to structure your blog chronologically or by topic. That’s fine—and it’ll generally end in a far better user experience. The important thing is that you’re paying close attention to information architecture during the planning process, with the last word goal of streamlining navigation the maximum amount as you most likely can.
Here are a couple of more bonus tips for improving navigability:
- Strip down your navigation menu bar to a couple (say 5 or 6) of options
- Use sticky ‘back-to-top’ buttons which will easily send a user back to the highest of a page without endless scrolling
- Introduce an enquiry bar, especially if your site contains tons of content
- Make essential and helpful information—contact info, FAQs and help options—stand out in order that users can find it quickly.
4) Good User Experience
With enterprise sites, it’s tempting to place all of the main targets on rock bottom—driving conversions, drumming up new business, serving your demand-gen mission. And too often, this suggests overlooking other valuable goals—like beautiful design or strong UX—in the method.
But here’s the thing. Investing in good UX design actually will serve your bottom line within the long-run. As McKinsey puts it, ‘good design is sweet business.’
Let’s say, for example, that a user lands on your site trying to find information about your product. Ultimately, you would like them to shop for. And your homepage reflects that: it’s an enormous purchase link front and centre. But everything else—product info, blog posts, contacts—is really hard to seek out . The user can’t get to what they’re trying to find, because you’ve prioritized your bottom line so aggressively. Ultimately, they’ll probably leave your site altogether, without buying or getting the knowledge they wanted.
The takeaway? Poor UX can push prospective customers away, and it can drive user behaviour that doesn’t serve your business goals within the future. So investing in strong UX design is an important component of enterprise site development.
5) Clear Content Strategy
This list item doesn’t strictly speak to enterprise website design. But we’re throwing it in any way because it can have an enormous impact on your site’s success (and it are often a serious shaper of the customer experience).
Essentially, enterprise content strategy is all about generating a firm vision of what you would like your content to try to do then ensuring that every piece of content on your site supports that vision. Your strategy should apply across the board—not just to blog posts and e-books, but also to articles, white papers, case studies, and explainer videos.
Giving some deep thought to your content strategy—and then removing any content that doesn’t fit that strategy—is an efficient way to streamline and simplify your site for better usability. Does one need thousands of blog posts, when only a couple of them are becoming page views and boosting your SEO? Is that long and wandering ‘About Us’ page really essential? Do your long product videos add value, or do they compromise the user experience? Is any of your content adding needless complexity to the structure of your site?
Your big goal should be to publish valuable thought-leadership content (like white papers, blog posts, and ebooks) that attract users to your site and keeps them there. Not only does this boost your search ranking and supply actual value to users—but it’ll also increase the likelihood that site visitors become customers.
6) Modern Design
When it involves enterprise site design, looks aren’t everything. As this list shows, things like designing for conversions, mobile compatibility, navigability, and UX should be a top priority.
But the visual experience does count for something—specifically, site credibility. Researchers have recently found that 75% of site credibility comes from the visual experience.
Users became familiar with websites having a specific look and feel that conforms to modern design standards—so any site that deviates from these standards feels less trustworthy and credible to users. And a less credible site will naturally drive fewer conversions.
This doesn’t mean you’ve got to mount every web design trend that comes along. But a successful enterprise site will adopt some basic modern design standards. Think strong typography, contemporary images and videos, and clean page layouts.
7) Testing Opportunities
Designing a successful enterprise site goes beyond the front-end experience. It also involves extensive testing, tracking metrics and site performance, and using all that data to tweak your site in ways in which to approach conversions.
So when you’re designing your enterprise site, it’s important to offer some thought to the testing tools that you’ll use (and to form an idea for a way you’ll actually use them.)
There are plenty of options out there, from tools that measure simple page views and clicks, to more sophisticated tools which will tell you which of them push notifications are driving user behaviour, and why. When you’re deciding which tools to use, attempt to believe your unique business objectives and find a tool that you simply can tailor to serve those. .
Wrap Up
Enterprise websites play a central role in business success. They’re one among the primary interactions that prospective customers have with a corporation , they will generate valuable leads, and when they’re done well, they will deliver real value to users.
In this post, we’ve covered 7 of the key elements that enter designing a successful enterprise site that delivers on all of these fronts. While there’s no one-size-fits-all template that an enterprise site should follow, this list may be a good start line for any enterprise site design project.
