Pillars Of Business Website Design
What Is Business Website?
Many people often confuse business sites with promotional sites, although these two types have completely different goals. Business sites make up a broad category of sites united by the same purpose. This purpose is to promote a business as a whole, rather than focus on a sub-brand or single product.
Goals of a business website:
- To provide details about affiliated brands and businesses without focusing on them. All businesses should have separate sites for detailed information.
- To show why the business is best to work with/work for. In other words, business website should drive trust.
- To instill reputation. Your web design should ensure its visitors in impeccable business ethics and bona fides of your business.
- To represent your level of scale. It should demonstrate from the first glance that your company is thriving and reliable.
Related readings on Loonar Studios
- The Importance of Graphic Design
- Small Business Website Design
- Corporate Website Design
- Anti-Principles of Successful Web Design
Design of a business site is not meant for consumers or clients. So who is it meant for? Let’s answer this question in more detail:
- Your competitors. Surprised? Don’t be. They should understand your ambitions, boldness, and scale of your company just by looking at your business site, which, if performed right, should provide you with competitive leverage.
- Potential employees. There is no better place to provide the information about career opportunities than your business website.
- Government/public authorities. It should contain everything that these people may want to know about your company. The more substantial and clear information you provide, the less inspections and audits your company is likely to deal with.
- Your workers. Why? Because they should feel they’re part of the team. A team page is created to showcase professionalism and skills of your staff.
- Press. You should track the way your business is covered in the mass media. They will release news about your company, one way or another.
- Partners, investors and shareholders. Publishing operation reports, indices, and statements on your business site will give them the opportunity to be aware of your (and, respectively, their) business achievements.
What Good Business Website Design Should Include
After identifying our business site’s auditory, let’s think of how to make your website appease all these people. In order to do it, we’ll have to identify the main business site design components:
- Social Responsibility and Mission
Target audience: Press, authorities, general public. All big businesses care about the public opinion. They are publicly associated with social contributions and business ethics, rather than just profits and income. From this perspective, coverage of grants, programs, and sponsorships will affect your businesses’ overall scores.
- Internships and Careers
Target audience: Authorities, employees. While the Team page is created to show that you cherish and value the contribution of your staff to the common cause and hard work, the Careers page should attract new talents to your future team.
- Copyright
Target audience: Competitors, authorities. Informing the general public about intellectual property of your company is one of the latest business website trends. So consider having the list of intellectual property/trademarks that are associated with or belong to your business.
- Locations
Target audience: Mass media, B2B customers. Nowadays, it isn’t enough to simply list your branch addresses. Your customers should be able to contact your premises within few clicks; they should know exactly how to get to your local office.
- Employees
Target audience: Press, employees. A proper business website design revealing real individuals behind the business’s decisions, strategies, and history, certainly gives it a more “human” look.
- Businesses and Brands
Target audience: Everyone. This is the most important of the business site design requirements. As we mentioned above, promotion should be kept to the minimum on the business sites. Instead, your company should be represented as the governor and owner of multiple brands.