About the Corporate Website

**Websites  The Documents of the 21st Century**

In the past 500 years, paper, ink, and printing were what the internet and websites are for today. If you work with computers in daily office work, you create and use many documents every day. Websites can also be called a computer document or a collection of documents. The difference with these computers is that they can provide access to a larger number of documents. In other words, while your home or work computer is a book that three or five people can read, websites serve tens of thousands of people.

**The Importance of Websites for Institutions**

With the widespread use of the internet, the importance of websites for institutions is increasing day by day. Websites form the window of institutions to the world, allowing them to reach all users in a very short time and to convey the necessary information to large audiences with a graphical interface suitable for the corporate identity.

Institutions should design and present websites with a high level of usability for users who want to obtain information about themselves to ensure efficient usage. However, users who try to get information or benefit from website functions often encounter websites that are difficult to use and not successful in design.

**How Should Your Corporate Website Be?**

Everyone will have different answers to this question. There is no single answer that can be given to such a question. It varies in proportion to the size of your company and the work it does. However, the standards I will mention below are valid for institutions of different sizes and in different parts of the world.

**Nine Essential Features of a Quality Website**

1. The domain name of the website should be related to its content and reflect the company well.

2. The content of the website should have a broad and original content structure but not be complex.

3. The logo, graphics, text, and background colors should be harmonious.

4. Flash and JavaScript applications on the website should not cause access problems.

5. The menus should be designed in a way that visitors can easily find what they are looking for.

6. Contact information and a contact form where visitors can reach you should be included.

7. The website should work properly and smoothly on all browsers (W3 standards).

8. It should be designed with meta tags and a link structure (SEF link) suitable for search engines.

9. It should be registered with Google and other search engines because if no one knows about your site, it doesn't matter how good it is.

If we examine it carefully today, we see that functionality is as prominent as visuality in well-prepared websites. Because the expected benefit from a website is to sell the product, service, or idea or to strengthen the corporate image. Before doing all this, the texts and visuals to be used on the website should be carefully selected and sectioned so that there is no confusion when the web design work begins.

**Successful Corporate Websites**

The content of your corporate website should be planned with your corporate identity in mind. After choosing colors and graphics suitable for your corporate identity, the most important issue to pay attention to is the ease of use of the site. Care should be taken not to exceed 2/3 of the screen width for texts.

A successful corporate website should:

- Be well designed, in line with current web trends,

- Be well programmed and utilize current technologies,

- Provide sufficient information, be original,

- Offer detailed visuals and more information to those who want,

- Include online information forms where visitors can reach you 24/7,

- Be constantly updated and renewed in content,

- Load quickly even at the slowest speeds,

- Rank high in search engine results,

- Include web visitor analysis,

- Renew itself according to analysis results,

- Preferably have customer relationship management.

**Promoting and Effectively Using the Website**

In addition to all these, the following items are very important for promoting the site and ensuring its effective use:

- Creating an advertising plan

- Receiving visitor comments (feedback)

- Comparing with similar sites

- Promoting via email

In short, a well-known and effectively used successful corporate website should have the features mentioned above. You should pay attention to these features when creating a new corporate website or renewing your existing site.