What is Your Corporate Website Saying?

If your Corporate website has a picture like this, you’ve failed:

If your Corporate website has language like this, you’ve failed:

Our award-winning software provides an enterprise level best-in-breed solution that has been implemented worldwide by Fortune 500 companies.

Why? Because you look like everyone else and you’ve failed to communicate anything real. What has a potential customer learned by visiting your website?

Coding Horror has an excellent new post entitled If It Looks Corporate, Change It:

Happy talk is the kudzu of the internet; the place is lousy with the stuff…

And then there’s the visual equivalent of happy talk. Those cloying, meaningless stock photos of happy users doing … something … with a computer…

It’s a shame that this misguided sense of professionalism is sometimes used as an excuse to put up weird, Orwellian communication barriers between yourself and the world. At best it is a facade to hide behind; at worst it encourages us to emulate so much of what is wrong with large companies.

I couldn’t agree more!

When I created my first corporate site, I made all the same mistakes. I used the stock photos; I used the corporate double-speak; I tried to appear overly professional and offend no one. In the end, I said nothing.

Finally, I realized that we needed to do something different to stand out and say who we really were.

As I would browse the internet, the company sites that stuck with were not the bland corporate ones, but the ones that opened the curtain a bit and said what they stood for and what they’re passionate about in no uncertain terms.

In short, the best sites did some of the following:

• Easy Trials: If you’re selling a software product, make it EASY for a user to try it out. Give them an obvious, simple, free 30-day trial. Whatever, you do DON’T make them call a salesperson. Most people don’t like talking to salespeople and won’t even bother.
• Blog Posts: Blog posts are a great way to speak in a more human voice and to provide current, meaningful communication rather than marketing double-speak. Now, blog posts can be ruined as well by having to much involvement from marketing and legal so it’s important to keep them genuine.
• Employee Profiles: Include some fun bios about your employees. What do they like to do in their free time? What really makes them tick and what are they passionate about?
• DIY Photos: This isn’t for everyone, but one place that I worked at, actually created their own group photos for use on their site. They were pictures of the actual people that worked there. It gave a much more personal touch to their entire site.

Don’t let your site fall victim to corporate non-communication!