Three Things to Consider When Building an Enterprise Website.

I get a lot of questions about what to consider when building an enterprise-level website, so I thought I would put a few thoughts together on the subject. Let’s start with a little clarification. What do I mean by “enterprise-level website”? That’s simple, it’s a website that represents your business. 

Like it or not, your storefront is now digital. It’s more often than not the first impression that most people will have of your organization, and they will make their minds up about how much they trust you in seconds. It’s your one-shot to create a satisfying customer experience, or even to make a promise of a good experience to prospective customers. So in short, an enterprise-level website is a website that your business can depend upon. 

So, what should you consider when building one? 

Agility at the speed of business

Businesses need to make sure that their technology choices allow their organization to run at the pace it needs. Good web design, for instance, should allow your team to concentrate on producing ideas without waiting for developers to build tools. Just as your technical team shouldn’t have to worry about working on the design. 

The secret to this is a solution that provides inclusivity, facilitates collaborative work, and allows teams to quickly meet consumer demand. That’s one area where enterprise websites often fail. Especially in the digital era, change happens fast! Market demand, sales opportunities, business requirements, and even organizational structure can all change in a moment, and those changes need to be reflected on your website as quickly as possible.

Unfortunately, in most organizations, those kinds of changes require an entire team of people to get them done. That can be avoided by choosing a low-code approach to your website.  

This flexible approach should be considered for all elements of a site, not just the code. For example, one thing that we do in our web development process with clients is a step that we call “Content Purposing”. In this step, we look closely at the site map, content outline, and wireframes, in order to determine what content might be reused across the site. This can be product information, a tagline, a marketing description, or even a call to action. We then build these blocks in a way to allow a non-coder to reuse them as they lay out a new page on the site, without damaging the brand, or integrity of the content. 

Taking an approach like this can greatly reduce your overhead, and save priceless time, and resources when you need them most. 

A multi-channel approach. 

Being able to produce content in one location and have it show up correctly across many different applications and platforms is key. In order to achieve this, businesses need to embrace a headless content system. In a nutshell, a headless CMS is a Content Management System (CMS) without a front-end distribution layer that stores, manages, and delivers content across the web, app, and other platforms while displaying that content appropriately for each. Update once, and you are consistent across channels. This also allows you to scale quickly, share content more efficiently, and even centralize the management of your content across your organization. 

At WiredViews, we’ve noticed increasing requests coming from our clients to create content and then adjust it for distribution across a variety of channels. Enterprises typically need a solution that can manage, design, and distribute their content efficiently. If you haven’t thought about a headless CMS, you should. Kentico Xperience is our platform of choice, and it excels in this area, allowing us to build efficient multi-channel solutions for our clients. (Shameless plug: If you want to learn more about it, check out the information here) 

Zero tolerance for downtime

In website development, another key factor for companies to consider is downtime. It’s obviously not an option, but if it happens, organizations need to have all the precautionary measures in place. To be honest, this is the single most crucial factor that differentiates an enterprise-level website, from a Wix or Squarespace site which was spun up on the cheap.  

The ability to handle large traffic increases over an incredibly short time frame becomes vital for survival at the enterprise level. If your customers or prospective customers can’t access what they need, within the space of seconds, they will turn to your competitor. It’s like opening your store but having a “Closed” sign hanging out front. Uptime is essential to providing the best possible customer experience, so always consider an enterprise-level hosting and maintenance plan for your presence on the web. 

These are just a few of the things that we do for our clients and t you should consider each point when building your own enterprise website. Hopefully, I’ve given you some things to think about, but if you have questions, get in touch with me. I’m always happy to chat. In the meantime, feel free to learn more about our Website Development services on our recently relaunched website here: WiredViews Web Design & Development