Most corporate websites are brochures, and nobody reads brochures. A vague About page, a Services page listing eight items with no detail, and a contact form nobody answers. The site launches, the managing director is pleased, and twelve months later it has produced no leads at all.
A corporate site that works does three things. Everything else on it is decoration.
The three jobs
It answers the person who has never heard of you
Somebody arriving from Google does not know what you do, what size of business you do it for, or roughly what it costs. If they cannot find all three in thirty seconds they leave. Most corporate sites hide all three and put the company's founding year in their place.
It produces evidence
Not slogans. A number from a real project, a client name used with permission, how long the work took, the constraint you had to design around. One case study with real detail sells more than ten with none.
It gives one contact route that is actually answered
A form that lands in an inbox nobody opens is worse than having no form.
Which pages earn and which do not
On the sites we have looked at, traffic distribution is almost always the same shape: the homepage, one or two service pages, and one content page that happened to rank. The rest are effectively empty.
| Page | What it does |
|---|---|
| One page per service | the only pages that rank for a buying query |
| Case studies with detail | turn an undecided visitor into an enquiry |
| Contact with real details | trust, and it carries weight in local search |
| About, with names and faces | matters when the purchase carries risk |
| A Services page listing eight items | nothing. It ranks for none of the eight |
| Company news | usually nothing, unless it is genuinely news |
| An image gallery with no text | nothing, and it makes the page heavier |
The first row is the one that matters. A single Services page covering eight services in eight short paragraphs ranks for none of them, because it has nothing substantial to say about any one. Eight separate pages do not have eight times the chance; they have a chance the one page never had.
The pattern that keeps repeating
On 16 August 2026 we looked at the sites ranking for the Persian queries for "corporate website" and "web design company". One pattern held across all of them and it had nothing to do with design: the homepage carries very little text, and what text there is talks about the company rather than about the problem it solves.
That is not an accident. A corporate site is usually signed off by a managing director, and a managing director would rather read about their own company. The person who arrived from a search would rather read about their own problem. Those are not the same thing, and the site serves whoever approved it.
The order that wastes least
Starting from scratch, this sequence involves the least rework.
First write down, for each service, who you do it for and what you hand over. This gets written before the design, not after. A site whose design is finished and is now hunting for copy always ends up with vague copy, because the words have to fit a box that already exists.
Then decide whether each service gets its own page. A service small enough to describe in one paragraph does not need one.
Then settle the URL structure. Changing the address of a page that has started ranking is expensive, and Google's guidance on URL structure recommends exactly this: pick something simple and durable at the start.
Design last. This is the reverse of what usually happens, and it is why we wrote up the stages of a web design project separately.
Where a corporate site is not needed at all
If every client comes from a tender, a personal introduction, or a long-term contract, and nobody searches for you, then a corporate site is a formal address and that is enough. Spending on content and SEO in that situation is wasted money, and it is better spent on whatever strengthens those channels.
The test is simple. Search for the name of your service once. If the results are full of companies like yours, that channel exists and your site has to compete in it. If the results are irrelevant, it does not.
Questions that come up
How is a corporate site different from an online shop? A shop has a basket, payment and stock management, and is several times more complex. A corporate site sells nothing; it generates leads.
Where do I find good examples? Instead of hunting for attractive templates, open the sites of three of your own competitors and see which one answered the customer's question. That pattern applies to you; one built for a different industry does not.
What does a corporate site cost? It depends on how many pages actually get written, not on the label "corporate". We separated the components in our breakdown of what a build costs.
Is an off-the-shelf theme enough? For a corporate site, usually yes, provided the theme is light and you wrote the words yourself. The problem with corporate sites is almost never the theme.
If you have a corporate site and it has produced no leads in twelve months, the problem is almost never how it looks. Building a site that answers the visitor's question is something we start from the text, not from the template.
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