Seven Essential Features of Effective B2B Websites

Start by defining your requirements. Even if the project is being managed in-house, write down what you want and what the critical elements need to be in the form of a brief to collect your thoughts. Committing ideas to paper increases the chances of success. I suggest you cover these areas:

1. Consider First Impressions

Your website offers a first impression to many visitors coming into contact with your business for the first time and needs to represent who you are and what you offer. Jacob Nielsen’s belief that you only have ten seconds to show your face to the world has probably been cut to five seconds in 2013 (or even less!).

Consider from the outset that first time visitors to a website seek assurance and credibility. It needs to convey that there is a stable, physical business behind the site and that is a company they want to do business with.

2. Build in Honesty and Integrity

Setting the tone on your website as helpful and offering resources like About Us, Our Mission, Our Philosophy and FAQs all help establish subjective attributes that customers look for. The UPS website showcases lots of ways to use content to provide customer support and useful information.

3. Make It Easy to Use

Bad navigation can so often result in a high bounce rate and reduced traffic. Using well-known Western T & F navigation formats ensures visitors can find what they are looking for quickly and easily. Most of the sites selected in this article feature horizontal and vertical navigation to facilitate easier and quicker access to critical information.

4. Update the Content Frequently

Content is the biggest part of your website strategy as it governs your selection of keywords, what you say, how and when you say it. Websites that offer frequent updates to pages that can be subscribed to – such as news and blog pages and other pages – ensures customers come back for more.

Oliver Valves, an equipment supplier to industry, has broken from the norm in its sector by providing a blog and a variety of news-based RSS feeds. Perhaps more importantly, it has ensured the search engine bots indexing the website for the keywords being used help maintain a high visibility in search engine results.

5. Use Design as a Differentiator

Most of the focus in web design inevitably falls on the process that delivers the look and feel for a website. But the visual branding is really important to help differentiate your offering AND to develop credibility. Use templates for different parts of the site – to cover home page, product/service and forms. Do think about typography and images that can make a page really pop. Avoid too much color and too many distracting animations and calls to action.

Acer achieved a brilliant design and user experience through combining color, shape, typography, photography, graphics, sound and video. This proves that a good B2B website design can create atmosphere as well as consistency in identity. This can also help provide a framework to support the functional requirements a site needs to have as well as the content it should contain to deliver a superior customer experience. In the Acer example, the signposting to other areas of the site becomes an intrinsic part of the design.

6. Build User Experience Driven Landing Pages

User experience (UX) focuses on digital interactive products, including software applications and websites. A positive and consistent user experience can be achieved by combining creative and functional design activity with accessibility, usability, information architecture and user interface design, which we go on to talk about below.

It is important to recognize that user experience is a key part of branding. Sites like the Dell site, which signpost routes to the content different audiences are looking for, also generally provide a better user experience. This, in turn, increases conversion rates by generating trust and encourages both loyalty from existing users and new traffic from viral referrals.

7. Test, Test, Test

As with all digital projects, testing is crucial – before launch, but also throughout the entire development process. When testing a complex interactive product such as a website, the first questions should reveal whether the system is even ready for further testing. Does it actually work? If the product isn’t usable on even the most basic level, real functional testing cannot begin.

The second stage focuses on testing the implementation against the specification; to compare what has been built against what was envisioned.

Pre-launch testing should then be done exhaustively and with as many people as possible to check things like if a user:

• enters a date in the wrong format
• inputs words instead of numbers
• tries to input JavaScript or SQL queries
• omits required information on a form
• seeks to override data entry on a form with special characters and not actual contact information

Summary

B2B websites are very different than B2C websites because of the way they are interacted with and the requirements of the users. They are rarely about immediate transaction. Most B2B websites are geared towards acting like a shop window or a content hub for advice and support on specific problems and challenges.

Knowing now that you have five seconds to keep that website visitor a little longer, what will you do differently?

Need more information?
René Power
The Marketing Assassin
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