Most of us know a good enterprise website when we see it: it’s usually got a clean design and bold calls-to-action; it’s easy to navigate, and the user experience is seamless. But how do you actually build a killer enterprise website?
Knowing a good site when you see it and putting that into action for yourself are two very different things. So in this post, we’ve put together an actionable, hands-on guide to designing a successful enterprise website.
We’re highlighting all the major components that go into building a strong 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
Let’s get started.
1) Conversion-Centric Design
Conversion-centric design is exactly what it sounds like: it’s all about optimizing the design of your site to drive conversions. It’s about deciding what you want your customers to do after they arrive on your site, and then filtering out any distractions that might steer them away from that action.
There are a number of ways to drive conversions through site design:
- Make clear calls-to-action: On your homepage, tell your users what you want them to do next, rather than leaving them guessing. Want them to watch your product video? Use a brightly coloured button that tells them 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 look at Hubspot’s CTA guide for some essential tips.
- Use directional cues: You can draw attention to these calls-to-action (and to other elements of the page that will drive conversions) by using design elements like icons, bright colours, or even animations. Ideally, these directional cues should draw the eye without interfering with the rest 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 make a decision at all. By limiting the choices available to users to one or two priority actions, you can increase the chances that they’ll follow through, rather than ending up overwhelmed by choice. You don’t have to eliminate other choices altogether (try putting the rest on another page deeper in your site), but it’s a good idea to streamline the choices that users see upfront.
- Be strategic with page layouts: People tend to scan site pages, but they don’t do it randomly. Their eyes usually follow an F-pattern or a Z-pattern, depending on how a website has been designed to flow. Luckily, you can control this flow to accomplish your goals, and you can take advantage of these patterns to strategically place key information and calls-to-action. There are a lot of guides floating around that can help you decide how and when to use each pattern: this and this can get you started.
Of all the ingredients to enterprise website success, this is probably the most important. Since conversion is one of the basic metrics of enterprise website success, embracing conversion-centric design should jump to the top 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 to be at the heart of any enterprise site design underway today. Consider some of the stats that Tyton Media has compiled:
- 62% of companies that designed their sites for mobile increased their sales
- 40% of people will choose a different 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 sign of the business not caring
Beyond these stats, the quality of your mobile experience also has implications for search performance—and it’s no longer enough to ensure that your site is responsive and call it a day. The Google algorithm now penalizes site elements that make for a poor mobile experience, like large interstitial ads that disrupt content, mobile-incompatible videos, and poor mobile site performance.
So if you want to improve the user experience, drive up sales, and get ranked for mobile device searches, a strong mobile experience is essential.
Our guide to good mobile design covers what this looks like in practice. Check it out here.
3) Strong Information Architecture
In essence, information architecture is the way that you structure your site content. It sounds simple, but the implications are big: information architecture is the key to helping users find what they’re looking for easily and quickly. A strong information architecture makes your site easy for users to navigate.
That’s why information architecture is important to get right on enterprise sites. You want your customers to be able to find what they need without wasting their time, whether it’s a blog post or a product guide. You want to make it easy for customers to follow through on your calls-to-action. You don’t want to lose business because site visitors can’t find the information they need. All of that comes down to navigability.
There’s no one-size-fits-all approach to information architecture: a site can be structured to boost navigability in a variety of ways. Here are a few of the most common approaches:
- Hierarchical: Hierarchical site structures are widely used on enterprise sites, so your users will probably already be comfortable with them. They start 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 visual thinker, picture an organizational chart or a family tree.
- 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 choose how they navigate site content. Rather than 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 choose where they go next on the site. Matrix structures can also use filtering options (so that users can sort content by topic, for example) to facilitate navigation.
- Audience: These site structures segment content and information by user groups. Think clothing sites that filter items for women, men, and children.
- Chronological: Sites with a chronological structure organize content by date—this kind of structure is generally only used for blogs, or for other content-heavy sites.
Usually, an enterprise site will combine a few of these site structures. For example, even if your overarching site structure is hierarchical, you might decide to structure your blog chronologically or by topic. That’s fine—and it’ll generally result in a better user experience. The important thing is that you’re paying close attention to information architecture during the design process, with the ultimate goal of streamlining navigation as much as you possibly can.
Here are a few more bonus tips for improving navigability:
- Strip down your navigation menu bar to a handful (say 5 or 6) of options
- Use sticky ‘back-to-top’ buttons that can easily send a user back to the top of a page without endless scrolling
- Introduce a search bar, especially if your site contains a lot of content
- Make essential and helpful information—contact info, FAQs and help options—stand out so that users can find it quickly.
4) Good User Experience
With enterprise sites, it’s tempting to put all of the focus on the bottom line—driving conversions, drumming up new business, serving your demand-gen mission. And too often, this means overlooking other valuable goals—like beautiful design or strong UX—in the process.
But here’s the thing. Investing in good UX design actually will serve your bottom line in the long-run. As McKinsey puts it, ‘good design is good business.’
Let’s say, for example, that a user lands on your site looking for information about your product. Ultimately, you want them to buy. And your homepage reflects that: it has a huge purchase link front and centre. But everything else—product info, blog posts, contacts—is really hard to find. The user can’t get to what they’re looking for, because you’ve prioritized your bottom line so aggressively. Ultimately, they’ll probably leave your site altogether, without buying or getting the information they wanted.
The takeaway? Poor UX can push prospective customers away, and it can drive user behaviour that doesn’t serve your business goals in the long term. So investing in strong UX design is an essential 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 a huge impact on your site’s success (and it can be a major shaper of the customer experience).
Essentially, enterprise content strategy is all about generating a firm vision of what you want your content to do and then making sure that each 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 weeding out any content that doesn’t fit that strategy—is an effective way to streamline and simplify your site for better usability. Do you need thousands of blog posts, when only a handful of them are getting 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 provide actual value to users—but it’ll also increase the likelihood that site visitors become customers.
6) Modern Design
When it comes to 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 have become accustomed to websites having a particular 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 have to hop on 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 that drive up conversions.
So when you’re designing your enterprise site, it’s important to give some thought to the testing tools that you’ll use (and to make a plan for how you’ll actually use them.)
There are a ton of options out there, from tools that measure simple page views and clicks, to more sophisticated tools that can tell you which push notifications are driving user behaviour, and why. When you’re deciding which tools to use, try to think about your unique business objectives and find a tool that you can tailor to serve those. .
Wrap Up
Enterprise websites play a central role in business success. They’re one of the first interactions that prospective customers have with an organization, they can generate valuable leads, and when they’re done well, they can deliver real value to users.
In this post, we’ve covered 7 of the key elements that go into designing a successful enterprise site that delivers on all of those fronts. While there’s no one-size-fits-all template that an enterprise site should follow, this list is a good starting point for any enterprise site design project.
