Corporate website design ideas

Time for a new business website? If you’re in search of corporate website design inspiration, start here for the inside guide to creating an effective online presence for your organisation.

Why is corporate web design important?

Did you know that 75% of customers judge your company’s credibility based on your web design? Your business website is your window to the world. It’s an advertising platform, calling card and virtual marketplace, all in one.

A well-designed corporate website will:

• Create a good first impression of your brand
• Provide accessible information and enable user-friendly interactions
• Increase sales and conversions
• Generate new leads from Google

Importantly, your corporate website is competing with other businesses offering the same products and services: if it doesn’t inspire trust, or give your visitors the information they’re looking for, your competitors are just a click away.

What makes a good corporate website?

Web design and development is a specialist skill, so it’s important to have a corporate website that is professionally designed. An effective website will do more than look good – it will work hard to help you achieve your business goals.

Signs of a good corporate website include:

• Great usability. Visitors can easily achieve what they want to do on the site
• Regularly updated content. The site is updated frequently and there’s nothing inaccurate or out-of-date
• Search engine optimisation. The content and other elements are carefully planned so that the site can easily be found by customers searching for relevant keywords relating to your service offering.
• Clean custom design. A custom website is unique, not only in its functionality but in how it brings to life a company’s value proposition. Building unique layouts and custom functionalities from the ground up are key to successful corporate website design, especially for companies who really want to make a name for themselves.

Building a corporate website

So you’re ready to start building your new corporate website? To ensure success (and a great return on investment), it’s important to follow these key stages in your project plan.

Define your target audience.

Who are you building your website for? This is a basic question that will help you to create a site that’s truly effective. Analyse your data to discover the demographic you are aiming at. Analytics from your existing website, paid search ads, social media and any other marketing campaigns are a good place to start.

Set your goals.

To measure the success of your website, you’ll need to set goals. Aim for a certain number of leads, sales, mailing list sign-ups or other actions that signal that your users are engaging with your site.

Think over the creative concept.

Your creative concept will be a continuation of your corporate branding in other areas: print materials, TV ads, telephone greeting style, the lot. Your aim should be to create a website that embodies your organisation and communicates your values in an instant.

A professional design agency will offer corporate website design advice that includes insights on issues you might not have considered: Are your corporate colours accessible to people with visual disabilities? What does the user research say about your choice of branding?

Develop a website prototype.

Before investing a lot of hard work in the final product, creating a prototype is a quick and easy way to hone your website, discover any weak points and refine your design. Test your corporate website design ideas on users to discover whether they are effective at meeting your goals.

Create your content.

Whether you’re repurposing content from an old site or creating it afresh, populating your site with text, images, interactive content and multimedia will make it come alive. Create a content plan to ensure that the site is always fresh and up-to-date.

Put it all together!

Once everything’s built, now’s the time to test the site. Your developers will do some back-end testing to check that your code is doing what it should. You’ll also need to spend some time doing front-end testing, clicking through the site like a typical user would – checking for niggles and typos that can be fixed before launching your site into the world.

What are the 5 elements of good corporate website design?

1. Content
A website is nothing without content! Invest time and money into producing the words, visuals and multimedia that will help you achieve your goals.

Other types of content like testimonials and reviews are used to build brand trust and loyalty and are viewed as an essential element of the website.

2. Usability
Ever given up on an online task through sheer frustration? It doesn’t have to be that way. By testing your site for usability, you’ll get valuable feedback on what works and what doesn’t on your website.

You might have the greatest product or service in the world, but this will count for nothing if your website is slow or has a poorly designed interface. Keep a close eye on your customers’ behaviours and centre your design around the user’s experience; a well-informed website design can give you an edge over the competition by creating experiences that feel tailor-made to the user.

3. Aesthetics
The ‘look and feel’ of your website will create an instant impression, but is it the impression you’re hoping for? Skilled design will help to ensure that your website visually conveys your brand values.

Tie your aesthetics in with intuitive navigation for your users. Incorporating a call-to-action, contact information and ensuring there’s no ‘stickiness’ with navigation scroll bars will all help your users navigate through your website seamlessly. By doing this, this will help your site’s ranking and traffic volume as well as its conversion rate.

4. Visibility
There’s no point in having an online presence if nobody can find it. Visibility online means a good ranking on Search Engines, backed up by an active social media presence.

5. Interaction
A website isn’t a printed pamphlet: it’s an interactive experience! Good web design makes use of this two-way interactivity to create a satisfying user journey that’s memorable for all the right reasons.

How can Lemongrass help you?

At Lemongrass Media, we specialise in corporate website design services for large and small businesses. To do this, we get to know you and your business from the inside out. Want to know more? Contact us on 0800 690 6250 or email enquiries@lemongrassmedia.co.uk.