Your website is your most valuable marketing asset — it connects customers to your business, allowing you to communicate your brand and benefits while driving business revenue. The stronger the structure facilitating that communication, the more successful your site will be.

To tackle enterprise-level requirements, you'll need a thoughtful enterprise web development strategy. Learn how to develop scalable site architecture that accommodates increased business processes to serve your organization for the long term.

Key features of enterprise websites

Here are the key differences between regular and enterprise websites:

• Scale and complexity — Regular websites are more lightweight in design and features, targeting a limited audience with basic functionalities. Enterprise web designs handle a large volume of visitors with complex interactions and extensive data processing.
• Security — Normal websites use standard security measures to protect basic user data and transactions. Enterprise sites require multi-layered security protocols to protect sensitive data, stay compliant, and prevent cybersecurity breaches.
• Customization and integration — Your average website uses out-of-the-box site solutions with minimal customization. Enterprise sites need an enterprise content management system (CMS), storage management, and integration with both customer relationship management (CRM) and enterprise resource planning (ERP) tools to handle large datasets and high traffic.
• Collaboration and management — Freelancers, contractors, and agencies with smaller teams and quicker workflows can manage regular websites independently. Enterprise websites need advanced collaboration tools, role-based access, and a dedicated CMS to support large teams and complex business processes.
• Scalability — Regular sites might not experience rapid growth or high traffic spikes. Enterprise websites are built to scale, ensuring high performance and reliable uptime as audience demands and operational requirements expand.

Enterprise web development benefits

Enterprise websites provide several benefits to you and your customers. Here are some primary advantages:

• Meet your audience’s needs — An enterprise website lets you understand your target audience's needs, preferences, and behaviors through integrated analytics. Based on these metrics, you can create hyper-personalized experiences. For example, highly targeted email marketing customizes content and product recommendations for recipients, encouraging prospects to reignite their interest in your offerings and take action.
• Elevate the user experience (UX) — Enterprise-level websites are often content-heavy, but a well-crafted one is navigable and informative, helping people quickly find what they want. The faster you deliver your value proposition through intuitive design, the more leads you’ll generate — and the more satisfied and loyal existing customers will be.‍
• Drive revenue — Enterprise websites support complex operations, optimize sales funnels, and improve conversion rates. You might add cloud integrations for storage and online transactions for example, ensuring your site handles high traffic while collecting sales.
  

7 pillars of an effective enterprise website

Whether your business is rapidly scaling or an established organization, successful enterprise web development hinges on the following seven pillars.

1. Scalability

If your website can't accommodate your business' growth, you'll have to shell out a significant investment for a redesign. Not to mention, a site refresh risks downtime when customers can't access your website. An effective enterprise site scales alongside the company, showing your commitment to long-term sustainability.

Traffic growth means more than increased daily visitors — you can also get sudden surges from widespread press attention and viral posts. To keep your site up and running at all times, make sure your hosting can withstand both steady growth and surprise spikes.

What you’d consider manageable data collection at a small scale might become overwhelming at a high volume. An integrated CRM system and CMS lets you organize new pages, forms, and calls to action (CTAs) to manage user information. Systematic structuring also lets you update and expand your site.

2. Compliant security

Your enterprise website needs to comply with the latest security measures to protect business information and visitor data. Even minor security breaches can significantly damage customer confidence and the company’s reputation.

SOC 2 compliance is the best way to check whether a service provider is on top of security. This process involves a thorough external audit with AICPA, requiring sites to meet five requirements:

• Security — Protection from unauthorized access
• Availability — Consistent system availability
• Processing integrity — Timely and accurate system operations
• Confidentiality — Protection of confidential information
• Privacy — Proper handling and securely disposing of personal data after use

Implementing single sign-on (SSO) and two-factor authentication (2FA) for user logins also protects customer information and profiles. Look for a web host or development program that supports these features.

Remember, security isn't just about technology — it's also about people. Educate your team and site visitors on common scams like phishing, sharing best practices to avoid spyware and malware. Promote awareness through internal announcements and website popups to create a more secure environment for everyone.

3. Clear information architecture

Information architecture (IA) structures website content to enhance navigation. The IA Institute says, “A good IA helps people understand their surroundings and find what they’re looking for — in the real world as well as online.”

Clear IA creates an organized setting, especially for sites with extensive content and diverse offerings. Like a building's layout with designated floors and rooms, your website's architecture should follow a clear logic, predicting how visitors would naturally browse its pages. 

Start by creating mental models that represent users’ preconceived notions and assumptions about navigating and finding specific content. For example, based on someone's previous experience browsing websites, they might expect to see a login button in the top-right corner labeled "Login." If it's on the bottom left, nested under a drop-down menu and labeled "Profile," it could take longer to find. These models guide your decisions so you can create more intuitive user-centered layouts.

4. Conversion-focused design

An enterprise website is an information hub for customers and a tool for lead generation. A conversion-focused design optimizes site elements to encourage desired actions, such as customers purchasing products, subscribing to a service, or filling out a form.

Effective conversion-centric design isn’t as straightforward as placing CTAs throughout the site and expecting visitors to click them. You need to understand user behavior patterns and create visually appealing, functional websites that resonate with their preferences.

Say you strategically position aesthetic CTA buttons and forms on product pages. Despite the visually prominent CTAs, conversion rates remain suboptimal. In response, you can add high-quality images next to these buttons that show the products from different angles. 

Provide detailed descriptions, specifications, and answers to common customer queries. Adding these features can spark interest and convince visitors to buy the product or request a demo, increasing conversions and revenue.

5. A unified design system

A design system is a set of internal guidelines and pre-built components that establish a consistent brand identity across your website and digital channels. It's a single reference point that all departments can access when managing your online presence.

Your style guide can be a hidden page linked to your main site with guidelines explaining your company's design language, including typography choices, layout best practices, and standard color schemes. It can also be a separate internal website anyone in the company can view.

You can also use pre-built templates to dictate requirements for any area of the site. Marketing and design teams can create and update pages based on the templates’ pre-approved guidelines, helping close the design to development gap.

For example, Mural effectively overhauled their website using a design system in Webflow. As they scaled, they used Webflow to accelerate their development and prototyping process while making their design approach more consistent across the site.

6. Responsive design

Responsive web design makes your site automatically adapt to all screen sizes, delivering an optimal UX on mobile phones, tablets, and computers.

A one-size-fits-all design approach doesn’t work — you must consider various screen sizes, load times, and layout needs. Laptops, for example, have more screen real estate than smartphones, so using the same code for both devices will result in cluttered content on mobile screens.

A responsive design ensures:

• User interfaces (UIs) change to accommodate the size and orientation — horizontal or vertical — of the screen.
• Typography sizes scale to increase readability across devices.
• Images adjust for full visibility and file size to ensure the website loads quickly.
• Buttons and navigation elements are sized to operate on a small screen and with touch operation.
• Gesture functionality (swipe, pinch, tap) works on touchscreen devices.

Find a visual development platform that makes creating mobile-friendly designs simpler, allowing you to customize menus, layouts, and image sizing for various devices. 

7. Accessibility

Your design and development must support site accessibility for everyone, including those with situational limitations, temporary disabilities, and internet connectivity issues. 

Overlooking accessibility requirements leads to exclusionary experiences and potential legal consequences. An accessible website, however, complies with ethical considerations and legal requirements, ensuring inclusivity and broadening your brand’s reach.

Accessibility involves several elements in your site's design. It means choosing text color and contrast to cater to those with color blindness and adding alt text for your images so screen readers can understand the context. Responsive design also supports accessibility, allowing people with low or no vision to scale text for screen readers.

The enterprise website design & development process

Designing an enterprise website involves distinct phases to make sure the final product meets your business needs and audience expectations. Here are the primary stages for successful execution:

1. Discovery and planning — Scope your website project. This means understanding your business goals, target audience, and competitors. To gather insights, you can conduct stakeholder interviews and a competitor analysis. Then, define the project scope, timeline, and budget to structure the design process.
2. Design and prototyping — Design your website based on insights from the discovery phase. Develop wireframes and mockups to visualize the site's hierarchical structure, and use prototyping tools to simulate features like animated interactions. Focus on the UI and UX to ensure functionality meets aesthetics for a harmonious site. You can also take inspiration from your business style guide to support a cohesive brand aesthetic.
3. Development and integrations — Once the design is approved, begin site development. Using visual development resources, you can create a scalable website that grows with your enterprise requirements. For example, Webflow and app integrations allow you to build sites without relying on developers and link them to CRM systems and other third-party tools. Conduct tests to ensure responsiveness, security compliance, and general site performance.
4. Launch and maintenance — Launch your enterprise website when you're satisfied with performance test results, and then monitor activity using data visualization tools to identify post-launch issues. Train your team to manage the site using an enterprise CMS and establish a maintenance plan for regular updates, security patches, and general optimization. Continuously improving your site based on user behavior and feedback ensures it remains relevant and valuable.

Build powerful enterprise websites with Webflow

By completing all of these critical development stages, you’ll produce a successful enterprise website that benefits both your target audience and your business.

Creating an enterprise site involves complex technology and software, however, including tech stacks, front-end development, and large datasets. These resources require significant investments and technical expertise to build a scalable and secure website.

Webflow Enterprise lets you leverage a visual-first design environment to create appealing, high-performing websites. With Webflow’s built-in security features and hosting functionalities, you can maintain an of-the-moment website now and for years to come.