Enterprise Website Development: A Definitive Guide

The number of internet users has already exceeded 5 billion. And the world’s largest search engine Google processes close to 3.5 billion searches daily. All of this should be enough of a reason for an enterprise to have its own website!

But you can’t just hire any enterprise website development company for your new website or to renovate your existing one. You actually need to select a web development firm that has sufficient knowledge on how to build websites & apps on an enterprise level!

In case you didn’t know, there’s a lot of difference between an enterprise website and a small business website!

So, a firm that has only developed simple websites so far may not even know about the needs of an enterprise website at all. This raises the question of what exactly is enterprise website development & should be present in an enterprise website.

Today, we will look at all the questions you might have related to enterprise website development. So without wasting any time, let’s get into it:

What is enterprise website development?

The process of enterprise website development involves making a website/app for an enterprise-level business. This is a broad term and can cover enterprise websites, enterprise app development, and enterprise software development.

With 62% of the world’s population having access to the internet, it only makes sense for an enterprise also to have an online presence in the form of a website, software, or even a web application. These establish the company’s online presence, achieve business goals, and even improve customer relations.

On the surface, an enterprise website may appear just like any other regular website with a domain name and content. But the tools and features needed for an enterprise website are very different. One of the key features that are commonly used by an enterprise website is that it utilizes enterprise content management (ECM).

Some of the popular ECM solutions available for enterprises are:

• Alfresco
• DocuWare
• Box
• IBM
• Hyland

 5 Benefits of an enterprise website

Now that we have looked at the meaning of enterprise web development & what it means, the next question is, what’s the benefit of having an enterprise website?

 Let’s look at the top 5 benefits of having an enterprise website for your company:

Full Customization

With enterprise-level web development, you get the chance to customize every part of your website.

For example, you can get a unique CMS to manage your content. You can also add an extensive check-out process for your customers that might not be possible with a regular CMS.

Last but not least, you get complete freedom for any software integration or custom storage management. And that’s usually not so easy with a standard web development package!

A typical CMS is built for a regular website and thus can’t provide the features and scale that are needed on an enterprise level.

Better User Experience

Another benefit of having an enterprise website is that it helps you to provide a better user experience.

As mentioned earlier, enterprise web development must grant you total freedom to add features and customize the website’s architecture. The point of this flexibility is to make it easier to produce an excellent user experience!

Let’s go back to the example of adding an extensive check-out process with an enterprise website. Let’s say your buyer persona doesn’t like the current checkout process for reason X… With enterprise web development, you can create a checkout process of your choice! Run some tests or surveys to find out what your buyers want, and the end result should be delightful for the buyers!

Another way through which an enterprise website provides a better user experience is site navigation. By default, enterprise websites hold many more pages compared to a typical site. Therefore, it can be tricky for users to find the information they want.

Once again, you can adopt a navigation structure of your choice which makes it easy for users to find information on your site.

Increased Revenue

Another benefit of opting for an enterprise website is that it helps you generate more revenue for your business. We have already discussed how you can bake new & customizable features into an enterprise website. Similarly, you can also deliver a better user experience with an enterprise website.

When these 2 factors are combined, increased revenue automatically follows up; it will become easier for potential customers to locate the info and buttons they need, thus finalizing the sale faster! Of course, this only applies when other aspects of the website are just as good (e.g. copywriting, colors, web design…)

As more users would have a good experience on your enterprise website, they will also share it with others. This can actually create a chain reaction where people keep coming to your site & then telling it to others (word of mouth marketing).

Online Presence

Besides offering many features and customization options, an enterprise website must also serve its primary purpose. That is to establish an online presence on the web that can also act as social proof.

Hitherto, you can’t afford for someone to Google your brand name & find no official website. Similarly, someone looking for relevant information on the web could go to a competitor’s website if you don’t have a website.

So, another benefit of having an enterprise website is to have a solid online presence

Achieve Business Goals

An enterprise-level website is essential to obtain your business objectives, especially large-scale ones!

Needless to say, small and often even mid-range enterprise websites need little to no sophisticated features to reach their business horizons. On the other hand, the goals of a large enterprise are usually much more extensive in scale! This requires a more scaled enterprise website that effortlessly incorporates the necessary tools.

For example, let’s assume one of your business goals may be to increase your sales. And since you can add a custom checkout process with an enterprise website, you can create a more user-friendly checkout page that increases sales.

Difference between a small business website and an enterprise website

Earlier, we briefly mentioned that there’s a difference between a small business and an enterprise website. Now, it’s time to extensively go through the key differences between them:

Grander Scale

One of the key differences between a small business & an enterprise website is the scale. In general, an enterprise website operates on a much bigger scale.

Such a big scale means a lot of web pages. And this automatically means a more versatile website that requires A-league architecting and navigation. On the other hand, an SMB website doesn’t have that many pages, and thus can do fine with simple navigation.

Another difference is the traffic volume!

Enterprise websites must be ready to handle large traffic volumes without going down or experiencing any problems.

De facto, any one with long experience on SEO would ensure that Google may send thousands of visitors in a short period of time to see whether the website is good & ready to handle a lot of traffic… If the website fails this test, it’ll get harder to rank it before Google algorithms decide to test it again!

Similarly, an enterprise website may require a lot of administrative accounts for the employees, which might not be very practical for regular websites.

Basically, whatever an SMB website can handle, an enterprise website can handle a lot more than that!

 Data Handling

Another key difference is that an enterprise website needs to obtain and handle more data. A high traffic volume means a lot more data to collect and protect. Once again, an enterprise website comes equipped with the right technology to handle and store such data.

An enterprise will also need a CRM tool that can handle a large amount of customer data.

Normally, you can find such tools in a small business website as well, but the problem arises when it’s time to scale up. On the contrary, an enterprise website comes equipped with handling more data on a scale!

 More Features

An enterprise business may require integrating different tools such as storage management, CMS, CRM, etc. Similarly, an enterprise business may require many more features to provide a positive experience to a large traffic volume.

As a result of these differences, the process of enterprise website development is very different right from the start.

5 features every enterprise website must have

It doesn’t matter whether you need a new enterprise website or want to renovate your existing one… You must know about the must-have features that separate an excellent enterprise website from an average one:

 Security

Security breaches among corporate websites have become pretty much a common occurrence recently! That’s an alerting reason to go on and ensure using a great and secured CMS & rely on a top-notch web development company.

A completely secure enterprise website or web app can help you to protect precious business data and even customer information. But even the most secured website would need a good cybersecurity firm to take care of it!

Still, there are many ways to ensure that an enterprise website is entirely secure. For example, code-level changes can be made to remove vulnerabilities. Similarly, the website environment should be coded in a way that if one part gets breached, other parts won’t be as well.

 Scalable

An enterprise website should be highly scalable to match the growth of the represented business. From a different angle, a hard-to-scale website would interrupt the growth of your business as it’ll be mandatory to upgrade it occasionally.

In fact, a website that wasn’t made to be scalable can start to malfunction or lead to performance issues as the workload increases.

For example, if you use a CMS that only supports up to 100 accounts or slows down as the number of pages increases, it would become difficult for your business to scale.

 Easy Integration

An enterprise website must offer easy integration of new technologies and features.

For example, thousands of plugins are available to integrate new technologies into a WordPress website. Per se, a WordPress plugin called WooCommerce, one can change their enterprise website into an e-commerce store. Similarly, an online community can be added to a website with the click of a button as well.

From a developer’s point of view, the integration aspect is much larger than this. And WordPress isn’t the best option out there… A well-rounded web development engineer would love to mold and edit the entire core of a website, and WP doesn’t allow that! Drupal for instance grants engineers a much higher flexibility and integration possibilities. 

Just like that, a good enterprise website must be built on a CMS that offers easy integration!

User-Friendly

Another critical aspect of an enterprise website is that it must be user-friendly… UX friendliness requires a really long article to cover; but we can name a few sub-aspects of UX such as:

• Easy navigation
• Clear CTA buttons
• Readable fonts
• Good choice of colors
• High-Quality Images
• Mobile responsiveness
• Multi-language support

Basically, all the things that can lead to a user-friendly design and functionality should be present on an enterprise website; be it a visual or an interactive aspect.

High Performance

Time is money. This is even more true when we talk about an enterprise that wants to expand and grow. That’s why another must-have feature of an enterprise website is top-notch performance.

One of the key performance indicators (KPIs) for any website is fast loading speed… A website that loads fast can prevent users from leaving your site and thus lowers the bounce rate. Another benefit of a fast-loading website is that it helps you to improve your conversion rate. And last but not least, a fast-loading website also helps you to rank higher in search engine results.

But the only way to ensure a fast loading speed is to use a CMS that was built with performance in mind…

Still, other performance aspect include website architecture, suitable site map, structured data, crawlability… etc.

What is an enterprise web application?

For example, an enterprise web application for internal use could be used for managing customer relations, departmental communication, data analysis, and so on

Another example can be an internal app through which team members can collaborate and report their daily activities. Access to such web applications is restricted only to the business employees.

Similarly, stakeholders or customers could use an enterprise web application for external use to track delivery.

The end goal of enterprise web applications is to provide more features to a business & thus enhance its productivity.

Some popular enterprise web application include Slack, MailChimp, Asana, Etsy, etc…

4 pros to enterprise web application

Now that we understand what an enterprise web application is,  let’s look at the benefits it can provide:

Highly Flexible

A web application can serve as a completely accessible platform for everyone. It doesn’t matter whether someone wants to access the web app from home or the office; it works the same!

Usually, accessing an offline app requires physical access to the hardware on which it is present. But an online app doesn’t come with any limitations like this, which makes it highly flexible.

Cost Efficient

From development to deployment, an enterprise web application only uses a single operating system. Per se, a web application can be hosted on a single cloud server & thus will provide access to multiple users simultaneously.

This feature of web applications makes them highly cost-efficient and helps a company improve its bottom line.

Easy Integration

An enterprise web app can be developed to provide easy integration with existing technologies or applications. As a result of this easy integration, interoperability is improved between systems, devices, and people.

For example, an analytics web app that offers complete integration with customer data could be developed. With this seamless integration, the enterprise could form meaningful insights about its customers.

Another relevant example is integrating a 3rd party API in your web application. For instance, a stock brokerage house can pull stock quotes from a 3rd party with the help of an API in their web application.

 Custom Design

Another benefit of an enterprise web application is that it can be custom designed according to your precise needs. This puts all of your business goals within a reachable range.

Conclusion

For a medium to large-scale business, it makes perfect sense to venture into enterprise web development. Especially with all the benefits of establishing an online presence, it doesn’t make sense to miss out on digital transformation.

In fact, you don’t even have to limit yourself to just getting an enterprise website developed… Depending on your needs, you can also hire an enterprise web development company to get a web app developed!

And speaking of an enterprise web app or a website, we also offer full-spectrum services related to the enterprise web development field. It doesn’t matter whether you need a professional-looking website for your business or you need a custom app for internal use… Canadian Digital Consulting has the right team to help you create a scalable and flexible solution for your business.