When you hear about enterprise web development, the first thought that must come to mind is “whether my enterprise needs it?” Most probably - yes, it does.
Any modern enterprise requires extremely thorough management and direction of resources, expertise, operations, and other processes to achieve its KPIs. And all this must be worked out in a uniform fashion. This is especially relevant for corporate businesses. When the market is expanding at an incredible rate, you simply cannot rely on your offline presence alone.
Enterprise website solutions or web applications can help you cope with the growing needs and help you handle tasks with more flexibility. That’s why it is important to invest in developing efficient corporate tools. At AnyforSoft, we are fully confident in this approach, and we offer our own experience and capabilities to help you lead your business forward. Now let's get closer to the point.
What Is a Corporate Website?
An enterprise or corporate website is a portal designed for companies, organizations, or businesses as a proper representation online. What is the main purpose of a corporate website, aside from extending one’s online presence? It is a great tool for attracting new and retaining old customers, as well as boosting profits by covering an online commercial space.
The underlined "formality", contacts, feedback forms, the tools to reach the company cause increased confidence among the site users, clients, and partners of the company. Such a website is heavily focused on describing the company, its activities, and products.
Backing up a good chunk of business operations, an enterprise website should commonly feature:
- An ECM foundation with efficient tools and strategy creation measures;
- Inviting design and the intuitive user interface;
- Elements focusing attention on the brand and facilitating SEO;
- Systems and tools for managing content storage, the security of digital data, marketing efforts, software integration, and other important aspects.
One’s own dedicated customer- and business-focused web space in the online background will strategically support your major business processes.
Must-Have Features of Enterprise Websites
How to create a successful corporate website? Must-have properties include:
- A platform capable of satisfying the requests/curiosity of potential and end customers to successfully complete the purchase journey;
- An online environment with a clear definition of the business and a list of unique enterprise offers;
- Fresh, valuable, and timely updated content;
- Elements that can engage your target audience;
- Clearly visible, attention-grabbing CTAs;
- Integrated traffic monitoring and analysis tools;
- Mobile-first navigation.
The most commonly employed approaches that help build a reliable online resource also include:
- Corporate web design focused on intuitive navigation and fast search;
- Adaptive development focused on achieving fast content loading and displaying on all compatible devices.
- The clearly defined selling point explains the business value for user audiences.
What Makes a Good Enterprise Website
A good corporate resource has the following characteristics perfected.
Scalability
An online solution cannot handle competition for long without scaling opportunities. The growth and development of an online business are influenced by the speed and possibilities of changing the functionality of the site. The portal can handle workload and resources without disrupting the site structure, increasing overall performance.
Poor scaling results in eventual crashes, inefficient resource handling, excessive workload, etc. That’s why, during the design phase, you should create a separate scalability checklist.
Universal user accessibility is critical. To gain the top positions in the search results, the site must provide a high-quality and smooth presentation of information, be easy to operate, update and maintain. To track down and fix enterprise website issues, you need to have the tools to identify them in the first place (the mentioned monitoring and analysis tools).
Security
You need powerful protection both when it comes to data security and defense against cyber threats and network risks, including the ones from competitors. Remember - reputation can be earned over years of hard work and lost in a day. A sturdy website has no security issues, is tamper-proof, and can protect business and stakeholder data. To gain protection against other harmful impacts, the following measures are also effective:
- minimized number of integrated plugins;
- high-performance hosting and regular software and plugin updates;
- manageable hosting;
- avoided integration with unknown third-party plugins.
Cost-Effectiveness
Controlling the enterprise website creation cost is of the utmost importance. Usually, only experienced developers can ensure that the final pricing does not exceed the original development lifecycle budget. The process becomes more complicated when you have to interact with already existing systems and technologies.
Performance
A large enterprise cannot afford delays in workflow, otherwise, expensive business processes can be hindered. The corporate website should always stay up because its performance affects the performance of the whole enterprise. The trust of customers depends on the stability of work because few people want to give money to the business whose website works with errors and failures. It is known that almost half of users don’t want to wait more than 2 seconds for the page to load and leave.
And the longer the user stays on the site, the more likely they are to become a customer. You can remove unnecessary formatting, codes, or spaces. Images, scripts, style sheets, should be reduced to a single level.
When designing, it is important to consider components that do not generate multiple HTTP requests and choose the right Content Delivery Network (CDN) to help cache across the global server network. This will allow the pages to open faster when the user returns. Compressing heavy files also minimizes download times.
Best CMS for Corporate Websites
Yet another important part of enterprise web development is the choice of a CMS - a tool to build an online resource in the first place. A business-oriented platform should be simple and reliable, understandable and efficient. At AnyforSoft, we settled on Drupal for the following reasons:
- Security. Drupal has the best reputation for online security. It protects the user's personal data, cleanses spam, and prevents spam bots from crawling the site. Drupal-based platforms are not easy to hack. Industry research shows that this CMS has one of the lowest vulnerability rates (2%).
- Reliability. With constant updates, Drupal is always ready to meet demand, regardless of an increasing traffic load. CMS adapts to any technological changes.
- Scalability. Drupal offers out-of-the-box scalability and speed to reckon with. Some of the fastest loading websites are created based on this renowned CMS.
- Multilingual localization. The CMS supports 94 languages, has a built-in translation engine that translates both content and interface elements. Moreover, Drupal 8 offers ready-made modules for multilingual website development.
That's why the Anyforsoft team - one of the largest in Europe - loves and prefers Drupal as the core technology.
Examples of Drupal-based Websites
We are proud to have implemented some outstanding Drupal-powered websites.
Stage Entertainment is the largest theater producer in Europe. The AnyforSoft team developed a brand-new content solution for them and launched an updated digital platform. All of Stage Entertainment's European websites were hosted locally, using different technologies and analytics, which made it difficult to manage all of them at once.
The complexity of the project lay in transferring all online resources to one platform. Each site had different goals, cultural traditions, different local planning. We managed to create a new show website from scratch with different UI/UX designs by implementing a single multi-site Drupal 8 solution.
Bellame is a California-based cosmetics company providing luxury products with powerful clinical-grade ingredients.
The company wanted to use the best-in-class enterprise website solutions to automate processes as much as possible. To ensure that the portal runs flawlessly 24/7, AWS hosting was chosen.
Our team has developed an adaptable online dashboard that provides all information to partners, from statistics to the next steps for the development of the company. It can help users calculate remuneration and compensation in less than a minute. Thanks to a convenient, fast, and scalable system, our client has achieved an eightfold increase in efficiency.
We also implemented a sophisticated, yet elegant anti-fraud solution. The system automatically detects suspicious activity, verifies billing information, and provides additional security checks. As soon as the system detects a dubious user, it calculates the likelihood of potential fraud and informs about the potential threat. The system is written to be scalable and is currently used for all Bellame products, including gift cards.
Bottom Line
Corporate website development is a definite must for business growth and position retention. It’s not just a “portfolio show-off” solution, but a platform that helps in day-to-day work: it attracts clients, connects the businesses with potential investors, and increases overall profits.
Choosing the right technology stack depends on the project specifics. The wrong choice can lead to financial losses. To avoid them, entrust the task to professionals. Contact Anyforsoft and our development team will select and employ the best fitting tools to create a first-class, highly functional corporate website!