ENTERPRISE WEBSITE DESIGN & DEVELOPMENT
Use Your Digital Presence to Elevate Your Brand
As the central hub of your digital marketing initiatives, your website design and development strategy carries a lot of weight. From visual branding to core messaging to speed and functionality, the way your website comes to life plays a major role in customer perceptions and sales effectiveness.
For many established companies in the mid-market to enterprise space, website issues take on added urgency. Technology platform decisions can get heated. Complicated brand hierarchies add complexity to design requirements. And legacy system maintenance seems to grow exponentially.
To tackle these problems, successful companies balance visual impact and technical functionality through the lens of customer perception. The more complex your website, the more important it is to consider how every decision — from martech to design elements to content strategy — communicates to your ideal customers.
Ready to Dive In?
Let’s explore how companies in the mid-market to enterprise space find customer-focused website design and development solutions.
- Building your business case: timing, budgeting, and planning
- Replatforming your site: when to consider a CMS migration
- Managing your brand: scalable websites for growing brand suites
- Optimizing your content: SEO strategy for enterprise websites
- Integrating your tech stack: complex development and API strategies
- Establishing your metrics: analytics and dashboards
- Taking the next step: website strategy workshop
Building Your Business Case: Timing, Budgeting, and Planning
Knowing when to invest in a website redesign project at the mid-market to enterprise level isn’t easy. For many companies, building a business case for a new website can help setting that strategic direction – whether or not you wind up prioritizing the project in the short term.
As you work toward a plan, key considerations include:
- Performance: How does your current site stack up in terms of bounce rate, conversions, and lead generation? Where do you stand in SEO rankings? How is your site speed?
- Competitive landscape: Have your competitors recently refreshed their websites, and is that having a negative impact on your brand’s perception as a leader in your field?
- Brand status: Has your company recently rebranded, acquired subsidiary brands, or refreshed your messaging? Do you have brand image challenges?
- Maintenance requirements: Can your team confidently and easily manage updates for your existing site? Are you spending more and more time on routine maintenance? How much developer time is required to make changes?
- Technology challenges: How well does your website integrate with other aspects of your digital footprint? How well do marketing, sales, and data platforms work with your current site/CMS?
After considering those questions, many business cases stand or fall on costs. Budgeting for a large-scale website migration, redesign, or replatforming can be difficult without a full-fledged discovery exercise. Depending on the features and functionality you need, a scalable website at the mid-market to enterprise level can cost from $150,000 to $500,000 or more.
A few key factors have major influence on website costs. As you plan, keep in mind that these features add to the price, but also profoundly influence your ROI:
- Accessibility: To stay compliant and create a more inclusive user experience, your website should follow the Web Content Accessibility Guidelines (WCAG) as an intrinsic part of your overall design. Accessible design takes more strategic work but pays off in search rankings and customer experience.
Learn more about how accessibility standards impact your website
- Integrations: Brochureware sites may look nice, and can serve smaller businesses well, but for larger organizations, the success of a website often hinges on complex integrations with CRM systems, data platforms, reporting dashboards, and other technologies. Well-architected integrations often pay for themselves quickly, as businesses maximize data use, streamline business processes, and drive advanced customer experiences.
- Optimized content: To get traction with search engines, especially for highly competitive keywords, content matters. Getting results requires a thoughtful SEO strategy, in-depth research, and carefully constructed page structure and content. At the mid-market to enterprise level, SEO isn’t optional, but it’s one of the best ways to track your success and prove website ROI.
- Size and speed: The more complex your brand structure, the larger your website becomes, and the more speed and load times are impacted. Strategic UX design can simplify your information architecture, but often larger companies support multiple brands and significant product libraries. In fact, for many organizations, finding a way to unify acquired subsidiary companies is a key factor driving a website redesign projects. You may find that streamlining your site size and improving load speed not only delivers a better user experience, but also leads to better cross-sell and lead generation.
As your unique website strategy and enterprise website design plan come together, watch for ways that your current website might be costing the organization time, money, and resources just to maintain the status quo. In many cases, larger companies find that redesigning and/or replatforming a website proves ROI through improving resource management as well as by increasing effectiveness and adding new revenue possibilities.
Find out how a service leader turned their website into a business process enabler
Replatforming Your Site: When to Consider a Cms Migration
Your website can become an important part of your customer interactions – as an integral part of your business as well as a marketing tool. From empowering customers with self-service options to delivering warmer leads to your sales team, a well-designed and technology-forward website can help to streamline and accelerate your business processes.
But as your business grows and changes, you might be feeling a pinch in your technology. For many companies, the content management system (CMS) that made sense several years ago may not be a good fit for the modern enterprise. You might be happy with your visual design and content, and might be getting good SEO traction, but how do you know if it’s time to consider replatforming to a new CMS? Here are some common growing pains mid-market to enterprise companies experience:
- Marketing teams can’t make changes to content without help from IT and developers.
- Content workflows can’t support multiple teams – making it difficult to coordinate between marketing, sales, IT, and other business units.
- Your platform doesn’t support the functionality you need for your use cases, and/or does include a lot of extras you don’t need (but are still paying for).
- Your content plan has expanded to include more robust user experiences, requiring tool, functionality, and form integrations your CMS doesn’t easily support.
Learn more about CMS selection and optimization
If you’re considering a CMS migration, it can be helpful to tailor your research to platforms that support enterprise services, and to evaluate vendors in light of mid-market to enterprise use cases. Our martech team put together a comprehensive evaluation of several popular CMS vendors using a framework developed specifically for larger organizations. In addition to those specific examples, you’ll also find a decision matrix you can use in your own research.
Managing Your Brand: Scalable Websites for Growing Brand Suites
Corralling multiple brands into one cohesive website property can be a major hassle for many growing mid-market to enterprise companies. As your organization scales and pivots, does your website keep up the pace?
From visual brand consistency to platform stability to streamlining backend support, migrating to one central website offers significant benefits. However, achieving those outcomes does require careful strategy and planning.
A successful website delivers on four key metrics — brand consistency, visual impact, brand voice, and customer connection — that only increase in importance as your organization grows.
Any time you’re considering a website change that involves moving from a multi-site to single-site approach, or one that incorporates design changes to establish or evolve a brand suite, be sure to start with a complete customer experience audit. Creating or updating personas, customer journeys, and messaging frameworks gives you data-driven direction for navigating complex website projects.
See how putting customers first can drive traffic and leads
To build a truly effective website that gives you the flexibility you need to anticipate growth and market changes, effective front-end design must match the right technical architecture. For organizations with multiple brands, platform selection is even more critical to success. To avoid costly upkeep and control on-site experiences, be sure that business units and IT operations teams work together to identify the best solutions.
Learn how elevating website functionality can enhance the customer journey
Optimizing Your Content: Seo Strategy for Enterprise Websites
Many larger organizations have a dedicated SEO resource in place, but technical optimization is only one aspect of a robust SEO strategy for enterprise websites. After controlling for clean code, clear structure, and optimized meta data, optimized content plays a critical role in driving traffic to your site and delivering information that engages the right audience and fosters leads.
Smart SEO strategy starts with the customer journey. Using your ideal customer profiles and data-driven insights, a savvy SEO team can discover which terms are most likely to deliver the right traffic to your site – and then create the content and technical conditions you need to make sure that traffic converts.
Find out how one healthcare company increased site traffic by 46%
Integrating Your Tech Stack: Complex Development and Api Strategies
Standard platform configurations and one-size-fits-all technologies serve smaller businesses well, but at the enterprise level your tech stack likely demands much greater complexity. To support quick pivots in response to market shifts, allow for marketing agility, and include tools and functionality to support your customer journeys, most larger organizations include custom development and integrations in their website properties.
Depending on the complexity of your existing martech properties and the CMS platform you select, you might find that a website redesign or replatforming project offers a good opportunity to streamline sales and marketing workflows. For example, you might integrate a custom form builder with the CMS and add a process workflow to enable sales team members to follow up on leads faster. Integrating asset management solutions, data repositories, and communication tools can likewise help your organization meet customer needs more efficiently and effectively.
Managing complex development workstreams requires careful management. Agile approaches can be helpful in keeping requirements, budgets, and timelines aligned. The two-week sprint process allows for iterative feedback and gives development teams more flexibility to address the issues that tend to arise in large-scale website projects.
Explore how a multi-brand company increased their website leads by 5X
Establishing Your Metrics: Analytics and Dashboards
Whether you need to prove the ROI of your website project or are looking for ways to easily monitor ongoing website performance, custom analytics and dashboards can give you the insight you need to drive better decisions.
To measure website performance and value, organizations commonly look to bounce rates, page load speed, conversion rates, and overall web health scores. Most companies also look closely at SEO, performing regular analysis of where their site stacks up topically, by target phrases, and for specific campaigns.
How to set KPIs for your SEO progress
While standard analytics and keyword research tools can be helpful, setting up your accounts to deliver custom reporting pays off – freeing up your team to perform more detailed and targeted analysis, which in turn drives better customer connections and greater profits.
For example, companies that were used to using Google’s Universal Analytics program to track web metrics often benefit from a custom migration to the new GA4, since those platforms are not a one-to-one switch and reporting options differ significantly.
Taking the Next Step: Website Strategy Workshop
Fusion Alliance helps mid-market and enterprise-level companies elevate their online presence at the intersection of design, data, and digital technology. As stand-alone projects or part of a big-picture partnership, Fusion’s approach balances technical expertise with creative brand design, so your website maintains — and elevates — your company’s integrity across channels with your ideal customers.
Ready to take the next step?
We developed a half-day workshop that guides marketing, sales, data, and IT stakeholders through critical steps for developing or refining your website strategy and identifying key action points to accelerate your success.
Ready To Talk?
Let us know how we can help you out, and one of our experts will be in touch right away.