Corporate websites face an interesting challenge: how can you render your products, your services, your people into a succinct, suitable website that doesn't lose your essential company spirit, fading into the background with the millions of other beige corporate websites? And how do you use that website's traffic and create navigation that drives them to convert?
Much of web design and development, especially corporate website development, comes down to user experience. As the second part in our four-part series on user experience for corporate websites, we're diving into how navigation matters: what to watch, consider, and plan for. After running through how content structure affects conversions, we'll show how the same principles apply to increasing how effective your navigation for your bottom line.
Continue Reading
One of the biggest mistakes a corporate website can make is to believe that the site isn't on the ground floor with the customers. Just because the corporation itself may interact less with individuals, instead relying primarily on retail locations and customer service centers, doesn't mean the site isn't one of the first places impressions may be formed. Especially when a corporation has decided to bring in an e-commerce element to their website, things can get tricky. How can a corporate website support this shift to bring in more conversions?
That's why we're running a four-part series on user experience for corporate websites, starting here. In the last decade, we've built our share of corporate websites--and this series will serve as a condensed version of the information you'll need to know when deciding which user experience elements might need improving to drive your conversion rate. We'll overview various elements of user experience that apply specifically to corporate websites, including content structure, navigation, multiple media issues, and how to create a consistent experience for your audience between your boardroom and online presence.
For corporate websites without an e-commerce element, tracking and testing the affect of user experience on your conversion rate will have a larger margin of error--but we've touched on a simple statistical method you can apply to use as a success metric. Regardless of how you'll track conversions--and whether they occur on or offline, or both--this series will help explain the various user experience factors that can determine whether or not a customer converts.
So let's get started. How does content structure matter? Can the right content structure actually improve conversions?
Continue Reading
Let's get one thing clear: social media matters. Unfortunately, like many perfectly valid pursuits undermined by the high ratio of teenagers doing them (okay, not many), social media is often an afterthought--if it isn't shrugged off entirely. From a business perspective, it deserves to be taken seriously. And by "seriously," we mean that it is worthy of effort and intention, not that it has to be (or should be, in any manner) approached with the same dry ploys of direct mail marketing or the stale sincerity of the decade-old spam collecting cyberdust in unread email folders.
But even those who embrace social media often overlook one very important element--the user experience. Social media is an organic, interaction-based organism. Without an effort to intentionally include social media into a comprehensive web initiative from the ground up, it will suffer. So how exactly does user experience fit in with social media?
Continue Reading
