
It serves as a connection between your customers and your business, sharing details and resources about your organization, products, and services in order to prompt user engagement. The stronger the structure facilitating that relationship, the more effective your site will be.
Your site might begin with a beautiful landing page, compelling images, and informative content. These elements will always be essential. But as you grow your business, team, and customer base, the structures that support a captivating front page need to evolve accordingly.
The more users you have, the more you’ll need robust security, adaptability, and accessibility. With more information and features, it becomes more important for the architecture of your site to be intuitive and navigable. And as your business grows, your team will likely grow as well — meaning you’ll need systems in place that help them collaborate when building and marketing your business..
From the get go, any business website should be designed to be able to scale and support each of these functions so it can best serve your users and your team as your business grows. Let’s take a closer look at the pillars that make up a successful enterprise site.
1. Scalability
Any business has aspirations for growth and success, which means the website will need to be able to scale in volume alongside any business growth it experiences. If your website isn’t prepared to support increased capacity, it can become slow, out of date, or compromised.
Growth means higher traffic — both from regular daily visitors and potential surges. Users have high standards for websites and will expect it to stay up and running no matter the circumstances. Make sure you have robust hosting that can withstand both steady growth and sudden popularity.
If you’re collecting user data, what’s manageable at a small scale may quickly become overwhelming at a high volume. Ensure that you have the resources to store and organize that data by building a reliable customer relationship management (CRM) system into your site. Your user data is incredibly valuable — you’ll want to be able to use it effectively as you grow.
A solid content management system (CMS) will also support growth by organizing the images, information, and other assets you use on your site. Systematic, predictable organization of content supports your designers and developers in building new areas of your website and in maintaining existing ones.
If a site isn’t scalable, it will need a refresh or expensive wholesale reworking once your business outgrows it. While waiting on developers to complete a site refresh, you risk downtime or being stuck with an obsolete site. No-code platforms can support scalability and avoid development delays. A scalable website can grow organically as your business does, seamlessly incorporating new needs and ensuring your website always represents you and your brand well.
2. Compliant security
An enterprise website’s design must be compliant with up-to-date security measures — not just for the sake of your business’s information, but also for the trust and confidence of your customers. A security breach, no matter how small, severely erodes customer confidence. Up-to-date security practices communicate professionalism and excellence.
There are certain industry gold standards around making a site secure. It’s wise to support single sign-on (SSO) or two-factor authentication (2FA) for user logins — these measures are the best way to protect a customer’s information. And SOC 2 compliance is the best way to evaluate whether your service provider is on top of security, because it involves a thorough outside audit and compliance in five areas:
- Security: Systems and information are protected from unauthorized access.
- Availability: Those systems are available to be used consistently.
- Processing Integrity: Systems operate in a timely and accurate manner.
- Confidentiality: Information designated confidential is protected.
- Privacy: Information is collected, retained when used, and then securely disposed of.
Don’t forget: Security also involves people, not just software. Make sure your team knows about common scams, such as phishing emails, and aware of the best ways to avoid spyware and malware. Having your IT team teach security best practices and promote awareness will support a more secure company.
3. Clear information architecture
Like the layout of a building, the architecture of your website should follow a clear logic, anticipating the way customers will naturally want to use the site. An enterprise website design with a strong information architecture will feel effortless for the user and help connect them to the insight and features they’re looking for.
A good way to do this is by building for users' Mental Models — the assumptions they have about where to find what they’re looking for on your site — when designing navigation, buttons, and forms.
4. Conversion-focused design
A key function of a business website is user conversion. The features of your site design should attract, educate, and convert visitors into loyal customers. This makes it one of your most powerful marketing tools.
Keep in mind that your website is interactive and receives as much information as it transmits. Empower your marketing team to harness the power of user data submitted through your site to execute marketing initiatives that elicit conversion.
Businesses spend a lot of energy attracting potential customers to the site — and just as much attention should go toward converting those site visits into loyal users. When you allow your marketing team to glean customer behavior insights from your website and implement strategies in real-time, they’re able to better respond to feedback and continually improve their approach.
Conversion can also be driven by simple, effective changes in your website design, such as site search. Not only do you gain actionable, high-intent data from that search behavior, but if that search is well-designed and returns relevant results, it will also satisfy customers and drive conversion.
5. A unified design system
A design system contains internal guidelines and pre-built elements that keep your website design consistent and unified. It’s a single source of truth any department can draw from when building materials for your web presence.
Building a distinct style guide can be an effective approach. This can be a hidden page linked to your main website containing guidelines and explanations of your company’s design approach. It can also take the form of a separate internal website anyone in the company can access for reference. All in one place, you can outline typography and layout choices, color schemes, and stylistic approaches.
Another approach is to create pre-built templates to use anywhere on the website. This is easy to do with a no-code design program that enables the creation of repeatable Symbols and Classes. Your marketing and design departments can then assemble pages and new parts of the website with pre-established, pre-approved, pre-built components. This helps effectively close the design development gap — empowering your designers and freeing up your developers for more pressing and business critical functions.
6. Responsive design
Responsive web design enables your enterprise site to be legible and easy to use across many different browsers and devices. 92.1% of internet users4 now access the internet via mobile, making it essential that your business website is just as beautiful and functional on a smartphone as it is on desktop.
Responsive design ensures:
- Layout changes accommodate screen size and orientation, aka horizontal or vertical
- Typography size scales so it’s comfortably readable on all devices
- Images adjust to remain fully visible and are the correct file size for faster load times
- Buttons and navigation operate well on a small screen and with touch operation
- Gesture functionality (swipe, pinch, tap) works on touchscreen devices
Responsiveness is also an element of search engine optimization (SEO), which Google now rewards in its search rankings.
Responsive design is achieved by using relative units and media queries that trigger your layout and design to adjust with the user’s screen dimensions. This can be coded with CSS, but no-code platforms have responsive design built into their templates, making the process much easier and more seamless for your team.
7. Accessibility
Making your site accessible for people with disabilities is a crucial element of good design. Having an accessible site will also benefit those with situational limitations, temporary disabilities, age-related challenges, and even internet connectivity issues. Having an accessible website serves your users, helps your business, and may even be required by law depending on where you’re located.
A thorough and up-to-date look at current web accessibility guidelines can be found at the Web Accessibility Initiative, but ultimately it’s broken down into four categories:
- Perceivable: Users can identify content on the page, whether visually, sound, or touch.
- Operable: Users can identify controls and successfully use them with voice commands and their keyboard as well as the mouse or trackpad.
- Understandable: Your site is comprehensible by the audience without undue effort. It features consistent structure, a clear layout, and easily understandable language.
- Robust: Your site supports the use of assistive technology and is IT-standards compliant.
Structure your enterprise website design to support customers and your organization
Building an enterprise website that includes these features means your site meets professional standards and is prepared to accommodate expansion. These seven elements build a foundation that’s secure, accessible, and able to serve the needs of both your users and your teams. By ensuring you’ve met these standards from the onset, your site and your company can scale safely and focus on growth instead of playing catch up.
When you build your website with a no-code visual development tool, designers can be confident the content they add will be easy for users to find — and they can play with innovative looks for your site without worrying it will alienate users with accessibility needs. Marketers can draw on user interaction to gain insights and create exciting new initiatives to engage customers. Engineers are freed from site maintenance and able to focus on perfecting your product and developing new elements for your web presence across platforms.
No-code takes work off your team’s plate during the times when growth is at its most pivotal points. These are key moments of opportunity. With a solid site foundation, your design, marketing, and engineering teams are free to innovate, experiment, and improve your web presence — and to position your business for long-term success.
It serves as a connection between your customers and your business, sharing details and resources about your organization, products, and services in order to prompt user engagement. The stronger the structure facilitating that relationship, the more effective your site will be.
Your site might begin with a beautiful landing page, compelling images, and informative content. These elements will always be essential. But as you grow your business, team, and customer base, the structures that support a captivating front page need to evolve accordingly.
The more users you have, the more you’ll need robust security, adaptability, and accessibility. With more information and features, it becomes more important for the architecture of your site to be intuitive and navigable. And as your business grows, your team will likely grow as well — meaning you’ll need systems in place that help them collaborate when building and marketing your business..
From the get go, any business website should be designed to be able to scale and support each of these functions so it can best serve your users and your team as your business grows. Let’s take a closer look at the pillars that make up a successful enterprise site.
1. Scalability
Any business has aspirations for growth and success, which means the website will need to be able to scale in volume alongside any business growth it experiences. If your website isn’t prepared to support increased capacity, it can become slow, out of date, or compromised.
Growth means higher traffic — both from regular daily visitors and potential surges. Users have high standards for websites and will expect it to stay up and running no matter the circumstances. Make sure you have robust hosting that can withstand both steady growth and sudden popularity.
If you’re collecting user data, what’s manageable at a small scale may quickly become overwhelming at a high volume. Ensure that you have the resources to store and organize that data by building a reliable customer relationship management (CRM) system into your site. Your user data is incredibly valuable — you’ll want to be able to use it effectively as you grow.
A solid content management system (CMS) will also support growth by organizing the images, information, and other assets you use on your site. Systematic, predictable organization of content supports your designers and developers in building new areas of your website and in maintaining existing ones.
If a site isn’t scalable, it will need a refresh or expensive wholesale reworking once your business outgrows it. While waiting on developers to complete a site refresh, you risk downtime or being stuck with an obsolete site. No-code platforms can support scalability and avoid development delays. A scalable website can grow organically as your business does, seamlessly incorporating new needs and ensuring your website always represents you and your brand well.
2. Compliant security
An enterprise website’s design must be compliant with up-to-date security measures — not just for the sake of your business’s information, but also for the trust and confidence of your customers. A security breach, no matter how small, severely erodes customer confidence. Up-to-date security practices communicate professionalism and excellence.
There are certain industry gold standards around making a site secure. It’s wise to support single sign-on (SSO) or two-factor authentication (2FA) for user logins — these measures are the best way to protect a customer’s information. And SOC 2 compliance is the best way to evaluate whether your service provider is on top of security, because it involves a thorough outside audit and compliance in five areas:
- Security: Systems and information are protected from unauthorized access.
- Availability: Those systems are available to be used consistently.
- Processing Integrity: Systems operate in a timely and accurate manner.
- Confidentiality: Information designated confidential is protected.
- Privacy: Information is collected, retained when used, and then securely disposed of.
Don’t forget: Security also involves people, not just software. Make sure your team knows about common scams, such as phishing emails, and aware of the best ways to avoid spyware and malware. Having your IT team teach security best practices and promote awareness will support a more secure company.
3. Clear information architecture
Like the layout of a building, the architecture of your website should follow a clear logic, anticipating the way customers will naturally want to use the site. An enterprise website design with a strong information architecture will feel effortless for the user and help connect them to the insight and features they’re looking for.
A good way to do this is by building for users' Mental Models — the assumptions they have about where to find what they’re looking for on your site — when designing navigation, buttons, and forms.
4. Conversion-focused design
A key function of a business website is user conversion. The features of your site design should attract, educate, and convert visitors into loyal customers. This makes it one of your most powerful marketing tools.
Keep in mind that your website is interactive and receives as much information as it transmits. Empower your marketing team to harness the power of user data submitted through your site to execute marketing initiatives that elicit conversion.
Businesses spend a lot of energy attracting potential customers to the site — and just as much attention should go toward converting those site visits into loyal users. When you allow your marketing team to glean customer behavior insights from your website and implement strategies in real-time, they’re able to better respond to feedback and continually improve their approach.
Conversion can also be driven by simple, effective changes in your website design, such as site search. Not only do you gain actionable, high-intent data from that search behavior, but if that search is well-designed and returns relevant results, it will also satisfy customers and drive conversion.
5. A unified design system
A design system contains internal guidelines and pre-built elements that keep your website design consistent and unified. It’s a single source of truth any department can draw from when building materials for your web presence.
Building a distinct style guide can be an effective approach. This can be a hidden page linked to your main website containing guidelines and explanations of your company’s design approach. It can also take the form of a separate internal website anyone in the company can access for reference. All in one place, you can outline typography and layout choices, color schemes, and stylistic approaches.
Another approach is to create pre-built templates to use anywhere on the website. This is easy to do with a no-code design program that enables the creation of repeatable Symbols and Classes. Your marketing and design departments can then assemble pages and new parts of the website with pre-established, pre-approved, pre-built components. This helps effectively close the design development gap — empowering your designers and freeing up your developers for more pressing and business critical functions.
6. Responsive design
Responsive web design enables your enterprise site to be legible and easy to use across many different browsers and devices. 92.1% of internet users4 now access the internet via mobile, making it essential that your business website is just as beautiful and functional on a smartphone as it is on desktop.
Responsive design ensures:
- Layout changes accommodate screen size and orientation, aka horizontal or vertical
- Typography size scales so it’s comfortably readable on all devices
- Images adjust to remain fully visible and are the correct file size for faster load times
- Buttons and navigation operate well on a small screen and with touch operation
- Gesture functionality (swipe, pinch, tap) works on touchscreen devices
Responsiveness is also an element of search engine optimization (SEO), which Google now rewards in its search rankings.
Responsive design is achieved by using relative units and media queries that trigger your layout and design to adjust with the user’s screen dimensions. This can be coded with CSS, but no-code platforms have responsive design built into their templates, making the process much easier and more seamless for your team.
7. Accessibility
Making your site accessible for people with disabilities is a crucial element of good design. Having an accessible site will also benefit those with situational limitations, temporary disabilities, age-related challenges, and even internet connectivity issues. Having an accessible website serves your users, helps your business, and may even be required by law depending on where you’re located.
A thorough and up-to-date look at current web accessibility guidelines can be found at the Web Accessibility Initiative, but ultimately it’s broken down into four categories:
- Perceivable: Users can identify content on the page, whether visually, sound, or touch.
- Operable: Users can identify controls and successfully use them with voice commands and their keyboard as well as the mouse or trackpad.
- Understandable: Your site is comprehensible by the audience without undue effort. It features consistent structure, a clear layout, and easily understandable language.
- Robust: Your site supports the use of assistive technology and is IT-standards compliant.
Structure your enterprise website design to support customers and your organization
Building an enterprise website that includes these features means your site meets professional standards and is prepared to accommodate expansion. These seven elements build a foundation that’s secure, accessible, and able to serve the needs of both your users and your teams. By ensuring you’ve met these standards from the onset, your site and your company can scale safely and focus on growth instead of playing catch up.
When you build your website with a no-code visual development tool, designers can be confident the content they add will be easy for users to find — and they can play with innovative looks for your site without worrying it will alienate users with accessibility needs. Marketers can draw on user interaction to gain insights and create exciting new initiatives to engage customers. Engineers are freed from site maintenance and able to focus on perfecting your product and developing new elements for your web presence across platforms.
No-code takes work off your team’s plate during the times when growth is at its most pivotal points. These are key moments of opportunity. With a solid site foundation, your design, marketing, and engineering teams are free to innovate, experiment, and improve your web presence — and to position your business for long-term success.
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Build your site for free and take as long as you need. Just add a site plan for more pages, and a custom domain when you’re ready for the world.