There’s no way around it – successful modern enterprises require robust, professional websites to win in the digital landscape.
When you’ve reached the penultimate level of enterprise, the marketing website becomes more important than ever. It serves a variety of purposes, acting as a vital gateway to your product marketing, brand awareness, education resources, customer support, and digital portal, to name a few. Moreover, you attract a huge, multi-continent audience with diverse needs and interests. On top of that, you have many disparate teams and employees that depend on the website to carry out their work and achieve their objectives.
So, how do you construct a website that is designed to handle all these added complexities, foster a pleasant user experience, and effectively drive business outcomes
In this article, we’ll highlight the factors you must consider to craft an enterprise-grade website and share some of our favorite enterprise websites from which you should draw inspiration.
Enterprise web design involves intricate processes for creating and maintaining websites specifically tailored for large organizations. These enterprises often have several variables that increase the complexity of their website’s design:
Lots of content types, increasing the number of components and page templates.
More functionality and dynamic content, increasing the amount of development support.
There is a heightened level of brand equity, which requires more attention to detail regarding branding, brand consistency, and visual identity.
More CRO, A/B testing, and personalization.
Higher content velocity, increasing the amount of design resources.
Overall, managing an enterprise's web design often requires significantly more strategy, time, and resources than that of a startup or mid-market business.
Another important but separate aspect of enterprise web development focuses on the strategy and implementation of technology that powers the website. Many of the development processes and tools will have a significant impact on the design of the website.
In our extensive experience designing enterprise websites, we have a pretty good idea of what makes or breaks. When we start a new website project for large, well-established companies, here are several factors that guide our process right from the start.
We have to begin by discussing UX as a whole. As a trustworthy enterprise and leader in your industry, you must be able to create meaningful digital experiences that intrigue, educate, and ultimately sell. The difference between a mediocre and exceptional engagement with your website could be the difference between your most highly valuable prospects converting and not. Therefore, your website must follow the basic principles:
Speedy page loading times: Prolonged waiting times can disrupt a user’s session, negatively impacting their opinion of you and leading to them bouncing sooner.
Strategic user journeys: The layout of each page should keep users scrolling and advancing to more bottom-of-the-funnel pages. This means having organized information architecture as well as strategic CTA placement.
Intuitive navigations: Utilize mega menus to neatly organize all of your pages. For enterprises with content-heavy websites, it's so important to avoid the clutter that can lead to users being confused or overwhelmed and subsequently bouncing.
Easily digestible copywriting: Too often (especially in the enterprise world), copy goes overlooked. While you shouldn’t stray from your brand voice, you must craft compelling messages that resonate with your target audience.
A design system is the very foundation of your website’s presentation. It ensures that even as the website grows with new experiences and features, a consistent user experience and visual language are maintained.
The design system also streamlines development processes by reusing existing elements, saving time, and increasing speed to market. To stress even further, the design system is an essential component of managing brand consistency, which is critical for large enterprises.
The days of hard-coded, uneditable web pages are over. Modular web design is the way to scale websites and dramatically increase your speed to market.
In its simplest form, you can think of a modular website as if you are working with LEGOs. You can break your website down into sections (or blocks) such as your navigation, hero, trust bar, or conversion panel. This way, you can easily build pages, rearrange, and swap blocks over time.
With this approach, you eliminate the frustrations that arise with rigid page templates. When you reach the scale of enterprise websites, you need this flexibility to efficiently make changes and continuously test and improve.
Modular Web Design Recap:
It allows for the ability to swiftly interchange elements within a page.
The same blocks can be reused across many different pages.
Content editors can build and edit pages without developer intervention.
It speeds up the development time of new components and templates.
Your brand appears at thousands of different touchpoints from billboards and commercials to social media and of course, the website. Whether your site is first or last in a brand refresh, it must be consistent with the visuals across every other marketing channel.
Another key point is that your entire website’s design is a direct reflection of your brand. From the way it looks and operates, it should be held to the highest of standards.
This doesn’t mean that creativity should go out the window! In our most honest opinion, we think that enterprises are traditionally too conservative and lack the style and innovation that actually makes a website in today’s age “professional”. Certainly, we hold different benchmarks between new startups and seasoned corporations. However, there are many modern design trends enterprises lack that inspire trust and foster more intimate experiences.
Responsive design is a huge part of user experience. When you have millions of web visitors, think of all the different devices they could access your website from. Each device will display your website differently, so your designs must be flexible and account for these variations.
In practical terms, this means utilizing fluid grids that can adjust to various screen sizes and orientations, adjusting images to fit containers, and applying media queries that alter web designs based on a user’s device.
Crafting websites that cater to all abilities ensures that every user, regardless of their physical or cognitive challenges, can navigate and interact with your site effortlessly. Prioritizing accessibility broadens your audience and embodies an elevated brand ethos of empathy and modernity.
Here’s a brief of the 4 pillars of the Web Content Accessibility Guidelines (WCAG):
#1. Perceivable: All users must be able to perceive the information on your website. This means providing text alternatives for images, using adaptable content formats, and offering clear audiovisual options, such as adjustable contrast and text size.
#2: Operable: Users should be able to navigate and interact with your site effortlessly. This involves making sure that everything is accessible via keyboard, giving users enough time to read and engage with content, and avoiding elements that might trigger seizures.
#3: Understandable: Content and functionality need to be easy to understand. Achieve this by using clear and readable text, ensuring predictable navigation and behavior, and offering assistance for input tasks when necessary.
#4. Robust: Your content should be compatible with various user agents, including assistive technologies. This requires using clean, consistent code so that both current and future technologies can interpret the content accurately.
Design a site that can rank at the top of the search results.
Ultimately, SEO is much more than content and web design plays a major role in how well you fare amongst the other blue links. The most important component of Google’s algorithm is user experience, which accounts for much more than just the words on the page.
Enterprise websites should at least consider these direct ranking factors:
Mobile and responsive design optimizations
Fast page loading speeds
Intuitive website structure for search engine crawlers
Proper HTML heading tags on each page
Lastly, your website needs to be driving towards business outcomes, whatever they may be (leads, demos, sales, etc).
As an enterprise, your web operations are not cheap. You need to ensure that the website is ROI positive, and that means turning visitors into paying customers.
Remember, websites are not set and forget. They are never-ending experiments that constantly learn, adapt, and improve. Therefore, modern CRO is most effective with modular web design, which allows you to seamlessly test different buttons, layouts, copy, and many other elements to find the combinations that convert the best.
Now that we’ve discussed what makes an enterprise-level website, let’s check out some of our favorite examples.
It’s pretty conclusive that Stripe is the gold standard for websites in B2B tech. They are an exceptional example of an enterprise with an exciting and compelling brand. Everything is spot on – their navigation, page layouts, color palette, animations, product illustrations, and typography – combined to create an unmatched user experience.
This one is definitely worth digging through if you haven’t done so already.
Webstacks recently had the pleasure of working with Braze, a leading customer engagement platform, to design a new website that embraced their rebranding. From the start, we adopted an entirely new color scheme that gave Braze a much more distinguishable visual identity. While the layout of many core pages remained relatively unchanged, many elements within got a major upgrade – most notably the illustrations. The fresh illustrations are bright and dimensional, bringing to life how customers experience the product. We also elevated the CTA strategy by increasing the number of user journeys across high-value pages.
Webstacks couldn’t be more ecstatic about how this project turned out!
No matter if you’re in e-commerce or SaaS, B2B or B2C, you can draw inspiration from Shopify’s marketing website. As one of the most recognizable PLG companies, Shopify has a flawless synchrony between its website and its product. Their website is completely product-centric - showcasing its capabilities and the stories behind its most successful users. Each page is crafted around its core CTA of getting visitors into a free trial.
As far as visuals go, Shopify’s website is a masterpiece. It effectively uses bold headings, eye-catching gradients, lively illustrations, vibrant imagery, and unique layouts. With so much going on, it makes you want to keep scrolling and engage with the page even more.
The creators of Jira, Atlassian, have a new website design hot off the press – and we’re huge fans. From a high level, the updated website architecture is very effective at addressing all the different use cases for their project management software. They cover all their bases with pages that speak directly to personas, industries, company sizes, and specific solutions.
They are also another example of an enterprise letting the product shine. Large, animated product illustrations are utilized across the entire site. Moreover, Atlassian’s trust signals are some of the best designs we’ve seen in SaaS, especially their testimonial slider component.
In the competitive landscape of project management tooling, your website has a major impact on how prospects evaluate you against alternatives on the market. Continuous improvements like this are necessary to stay at the forefront of B2B website design.
Now, we turn to the automotive industry and take a look at Tesla. It’s a minimalistic yet stunning website that lets the high-resolution imagery do most of the selling. The website is fully responsive, ensuring that it looks and functions well on all devices, from desktops to smartphones. This is crucial for providing a seamless user experience across different platforms.
From a CRO perspective, it’s extremely effective at tailoring to both the users who are ready to order now, and those who want to schedule a demo drive. Additionally, the navigation is b
Let’s check out an enterprise that truly breaks that mold of traditional enterprise web design: GitHub. The popular developer platform has a very innovative website and mimics a lot of the trends seen in Web3 design - most notably dark mode, neon colors, and futuristic visuals.
One reason this works so well for GitHub is that they understand their audience of web-obsessed developers. While not every enterprise can take this approach, GitHub captured the opportunity to express their creativity and create a remarkable design.
Next up we have Freshworks, an enterprise cloud-based provider of CRM, IT, and sales tools.
Another client of Webstacks, Freshworks, was aiming to create a more professional, enterprise-grade website. This involved upgrading their web tech stack, modernizing their online identity, and revamping the user experience.
We switched it up from a fairly flat standard color scheme to a contemporary, gradient-style aesthetic. Another focus was incorporating more powerful social proof, which resulted in the addition of trust bars, human-centric illustrations, and brand-new testimonial components.
Okta is the leading independent provider of employee and customer identity solutions for organizations.
As a global enterprise, Okta’s existence in the security industry creates extra responsibility to present itself as an experienced and trustworthy brand. A large component of this identity comes from having a fast, intuitive, and bug-free marketing website.
Okta offers an engaging, feature-heavy experience that is designed to instill trust.
Hashicorp is renowned for its worldwide multi-cloud infrastructure automation solutions. It also has a top-tier marketing website among publicly traded companies. Powered by a composable tech stack, the Hashicorp website provides a speedy, user-friendly experience that reflects the reliability and integrity of its products.
In terms of presentation, the website does a great job of blending startup-y design trends with the professionalism required of enterprises.
We round out our examples with one more client of Webstacks, Aspire. The field service management software company serves over 50,000 users across 1,100 locations, performing roughly $4 billion in annualized transactions.
Our engagement with their marketing team stemmed from our longstanding relationship with ServiceTitan, Aspire’s parent company. We helped transform their entire website from its backend to the design. With a scalable modular website, Aspire could now scale its content on top of a visually and technically sound foundation.
There you have it—some best practices and prime examples to inspire you to improve your enterprise web design.
Here are just a few key takeaways to remember before you dive into your next website project:
Don’t be afraid to go against the grain. Enterprise websites don’t have to be boring. Given their influence, they should actually be some of the most aesthetically pleasing and innovative websites in the business world.
Start with a solid foundation. Given their complexity, enterprise websites must employ scalable and flexible technologies, as well as a modular design approach.
Find the right partner. If you plan on partnering with an external agency, choose one that has ample enterprise experience and knows how to build and manage modern tech stacks (since you’re already here, check out Webstacks’ design and development capabilities).
Lastly, if you want to see more examples of web design in B2B tech, check out our most anticipated eBook of the year below.