Corporate web design is a different discipline from building a simple brochure website. When a company is of significant size, serves a diverse audience, and operates in a competitive industry, its website needs to work harder, faster, and more strategically than ever before. Giving your corporate web design clear, well-defined objectives is the foundation of a website that delivers real business value.
Without objectives, web design becomes purely subjective. Every decision about layout, color, content, and navigation is made based on personal preference rather than strategic intent. The result is a website that may look polished but fails to move the needle on the metrics that actually matter to the business.
In this guide, we will walk through the most important corporate web design objectives that businesses should set before undertaking a website project, and explain how each one translates into design and development decisions that drive results.
Like most businesses, yours will face many constraints, parameters, and plateaus. To avoid being upset by these natural events, it is essential to point out the most common methods with which these obstacles manifest themselves incorporate web design.
Web knowledge is a must that will discuss determining a content management system. If you take nothing else away, remember that technology decisions are now rarely isolated from other business decisions. Even local plumbers, workers, and other traditional low-tech industries have to face expertise decisions that affect the entire embroidery of their business.
Strengthening Your Objectives
It’s accessible to envoy jobs until they are so specific that each employee resembles a cog in an industrial assembly line. Collaboration is challenging; you have to filter out noise, listen to wrong opinions, and see things from contradicting angles. However, go through the process of collaboration. You can end up with a digital occurrence that not only pleases you and your design team. But one that wisely caters to your customers’ needs, clients, affected roles, and fans.
When strengthening the design objectives that will improve your business goals, there is an essential checklist that should take place:
- Discover – This is where all of your company’s separate teams or members sit down and define the computable requisites.
- Storyboard – Once the urgency of measurables has been recognized, the design team can begin to develop layout versions. And user border sketches that define the elementary flow of your site or app.
- Test – As soon as different workers or friends have played around with the designs, they can give a response about likes and dislikes. Since you won’t be able to please everybody here, stay loyal to the computable requirements you laid out in the finding stage.
- Implement/Refine/Deliver – With the preparation and exploration phases over, all that’s left is to deliver an improved user experience.
Creating Your Corporate Web Design Objectives and Solutions
Once you cover the required considerations, you can proceed with making your professional website.
Suppose you hire a website design agency to help. In that case, they’ll cover the whole procedure to ensure that your web design objectives and solution resonate flawlessly with your target audience. You have to stand out from your participants and realize your website’s specific purpose.
The phases of business web design include:
- Discovery: The discovery phase includes a conversation around the scope of your project, along with your target audience, platforms and networks, computable goals, and more.
- Wireframing: During the wireframing segment, web designers will create your website’s wireframe — a structural essential that establishes the website’s basic architecture
- Design: In the design segment, designers take the wireframe and increase it with visual design essentials until they get a complete sample of what your site will look like.
- Development: Once the design mockups are prepared, the designers will turn them over to the website development team to build an entirely functional website based on the design.
- Iteration: As the name proposes, your website will go through many iterations during the iteration phase until the creators eliminate all possible performance issues and bugs.
- Optimization: When your website is stable and working, SEO experts will step in to confirm that it’s improved to rank high in search engines and organic interest traffic.
- Launch: Congratulations, your website is now completed to go live and start bringing you new customers while being monitored and optimized regularly to maximize results.
Why it Works
Looking over this checklist, it is feasible to see non-designers and non-developers involved through at least the first 3 stages. While unconfirmed chatter between techies and non-techies is not always creative, goal-oriented discourse gives everyone a path.
Let’s quickly outline the case of E-Sprockets Inc, a hypothetical manufacturing company planning a site redesign. E-Sprockets has been able to deny their falling local market share until now when a competitor takes away one of their largest clients. Then, reality staring them in the face, all 10 decision-making heads are called in to talk nerve tacks.
After the smoke clears, the compromise points out a few clear parameters: the raw material prices of your primary vendors have risen steeply. The new customers are unaware of the unique procedure to make higher-quality sprockets at market costs. As a result, your team decides that high-priority, computable objectives should include new vendor analytics and improved client education.
These objectives are evident in new areas of the business design, which will now include a protruding vendor signup area and a noticeable white paper/download area. Where potential clients can be informed about your unique manufacturing process.
Case Lessons
Let’s venture out in the wild and compare the way a few corporate sites have made critical design choices to shadow their business goals over the years.
Corporate websites serve as the digital front door for enterprises that may have dozens of service lines, thousands of employees, and audiences spread across multiple countries and industries. The complexity of a corporate web design project is significantly higher than a small business site, which is why having explicit, prioritized objectives is non-negotiable. Without them, large web projects tend to expand endlessly in scope, take longer than planned, and deliver results that satisfy no one because no one was ever clear about what success would look like.
A seasoned web design services provider will always begin a corporate web project with a discovery phase dedicated entirely to understanding and documenting these objectives, so every decision made during the design and development process can be evaluated against them.
Adidas
Adidas is in the business of exporting shoes and various fitness clothing worldwide. In 2011, their design absorbed interactively showing how famous athletes wore their products. A few years later, the site aims to remove clutter to just focus on one celebrity at a time. The design moves from grownup Flash-based interactivity into a responsive layout that highlights search, user-focused navigation, and one-click shopping.
One of the most often cited corporate web design objectives is improving brand consistency across all digital touchpoints. Large organizations frequently struggle with inconsistent design across different sections of their website, particularly when different departments or regional teams have contributed content over time. A redesign with clear brand guidelines baked into every template and component ensures that visitors experience a unified brand identity regardless of which part of the site they visit first.
Airbnb
The alternate lodging rental company had a design in 2010 that was not too far off from its 2014 implementation. However, design objectives called for less clutter, more show, and less tell. Finding a place to stay from the element in the newer version is prominent, with little else of significant importance. The takeaway here is that the design lends itself to increased bookings and creates competitive departure by attempting to place Airbnb user involvement above that of its competitors.
SEO MOZ
The SEO marketing software and tools company made a drastic redesign from its 2010 version. Their old design was reminiscent of a rigid business void of any personality. The newer design speaks with a voice that appeals to millennial entrepreneurs with a bootstrapping, startup mentality. The explicit goal of the software-as-a-service homepage is to bring the user into a trial for a paid monthly subscription. In addition, they shortened their name from SEOmoz to Moz for name recognition and search engine purposes.
Scalability is another critical corporate web design objective that often gets overlooked in the excitement of a redesign. A website built for a company’s current size may struggle to accommodate rapid growth in traffic, content volume, or new service areas. Building scalability into the architecture from the beginning, through thoughtful content management system configuration and modular design systems, ensures the website can grow alongside the business without requiring another complete rebuild in two to three years.
Integration with other enterprise systems is equally important. A corporate website rarely operates in isolation. It needs to connect with CRM systems, marketing automation platforms, analytics tools, customer portals, and e-commerce systems. Defining these integration requirements as part of the web design objectives ensures the technical architecture is designed to support them from day one.
ESPN
This Disney-owned sports media conglomerate has goals similar to most media companies. They need to sell ads and premium services, such as online subscriptions. In ESPN’s more dated implementation, they seemed to self-promote their on-air personalities in prime layout positions. More recently, they have decided to make a conspicuous effort to focus on video as a long-term investment. A layout that highlights their video assets leads to higher user engagement, time on site, and increased advertising revenue and sponsorship opportunities.
In their particular case, they have decided against a total reconstruction of their layout, opting instead to keep a similar appearance despite increasing pressure on their market. As a result, share from competitors such as Fox Sports, the earlier designs.
For corporate organizations, the stakes of a slow or poorly performing website are particularly high. A one-second delay in page load time can result in a 7% reduction in conversions, and for large corporate websites with high traffic volumes, that can translate into millions of dollars in lost revenue annually. Setting performance objectives and holding the development team accountable for meeting them through rigorous testing is a non-negotiable part of a professional corporate web design project.
Take-Aways
The trend towards more personal, more engaging design has been made clear. Companies that thrive are taking a comprehensive approach to their design and placing the user experience on a pedestal. Whether your industry is retail, service, software, marketing, construction, local, national, global, customer-facing, or business-to-business. Your corporate design must mirror the experience you wish to give to your audience.
The above are some Companies that start their corporate branding from scratch and are now well-known worldwide. So now you know why Giving your corporate a Web design should be your objective.
Bringing It All Together: A Framework for Corporate Web Design Success
The most successful corporate websites are the ones built on a foundation of clear, measurable objectives that align with the company’s broader business strategy. Here is a simple framework for developing your corporate web design objectives:
Step 1: Identify your primary audience. Corporate websites often serve multiple audience segments, including potential clients, current customers, job candidates, investors, and media. Understand who matters most to your business right now, and design the site hierarchy to serve their needs first.
Step 2: Define your conversion goals. What specific actions do you want each audience segment to take? Schedule a consultation? Download a whitepaper? Request a demo? Your conversion goals should be specific, measurable, and tied directly to revenue.
Step 3: Map the user journey. For each audience segment and each conversion goal, map the journey a user would take from landing on your site to completing the desired action. Identify any friction points or gaps in the current design that are preventing that journey from being completed smoothly.
Step 4: Set performance benchmarks. What does success look like at 3 months, 6 months, and 12 months post-launch? Setting clear performance benchmarks before the project starts gives you a way to evaluate whether the investment is paying off and where to focus optimization efforts.
At Image DPI, we work with corporate clients to define these objectives from the very beginning of every web design engagement. Our custom web design services are built around understanding your business goals and translating them into a website that works as hard as you do. If you are ready to give your corporate web presence the strategic foundation it deserves, we would love to help you get started.
