Corporate websites

A corporate website is read differently from an ad page. The visitor has often heard of you already: they received your proposal, saw you in a tender or got a referral. They come to the site to check whether the company is what it claims to be. So the slogan decides little here. What counts is how quickly the visitor finds answers to four questions: what exactly you do, who you have done it for, who the people are and how to reach you.

In B2B sales the dry details matter. The legal name, registry code, VAT number and address should be on the site and match the Estonian Business Register, because a partner will check anyway. For an OÜ run by an e-resident this matters even more, as a foreign client has little else to verify you by. The contact page should list real people with a name, role and direct contact, not only a generic info@ address. In case studies, the client's name and the scope of work are the most convincing elements, with the client's permission of course.

The third reader is a future employee. Before applying they look at the team page, the photos and how the company talks about itself. A good corporate website routes all three from the home page: the client to services, the partner to case studies and company details, the job seeker to careers.

Structure is settled before design. The main rule is that every service gets its own page. Google shows a searcher one specific page, and an overview page listing eight services does not answer any single query precisely enough. A dedicated service page has room to explain who the service is for, how the work is done and which projects you have delivered in that field.

We build the case study section so that every case follows the same pattern: task, solution, result. In the Pro tier, cases are managed in a CMS, so adding a new project does not need a developer. A company with several locations gets a page per location with the address, opening hours and a map, because in local search it is the location page that shows up.

Structure follows the company's visitors, not a template. On the brand site of event promoter Selecta Events, the upcoming events lineup, music players and venue map take centre stage, because that is what its audience comes for. If you have one service and need fewer than five pages, a standard website is enough and costs less. A corporate website pays off when there are enough service lines, people and projects to need sections of their own.

Design and development timelines are predictable. What delays a corporate website is almost always content: copy is waiting on a department head, team photos have not been taken, a client has not been asked for permission to be named. That is why we recommend appointing one project owner in the company with the authority to decide. When every board member comments on the mockup separately and at different times, sign-off stretches by weeks.

Service descriptions turn out best when your specialist talks and we write. Copy written by a technical person is usually accurate but hard for a client to read. Team photos are worth doing in a single shoot in one style, since portraits taken at different times against different backgrounds look accidental. Ask clients for written permission to publish a case early, as the answer can take time.

Content is collected alongside design, not after it. If copy and photos are ready when development starts, the site ships about a week sooner. We help gather the material and give you a list, page by page, of what we need from you.

Languages are chosen by market, not by habit. Estonian is the base for a company selling locally. Russian is needed when you serve local customers in Tallinn or Ida-Viru County. English is what foreign partners and export markets expect, and for many e-resident companies it is the primary language. Finnish is worth adding when you really have customers in Finland. Each language is also a commitment: enquiries have to be answered in that language and future changes translated.

Technically, each language version gets its own URL and the pages are linked with hreflang. The language switcher takes the visitor to the same page in the other language, not to the home page. An automatic translation widget is no substitute, because its text only appears in the visitor's browser and Google does not see it as a separate page. Have your own specialist review industry terms, since a translator may not know your field's vocabulary.

Not every language has to launch at once. Sites often open in one language and add the others as a next phase. The Pro tier includes two languages, the Multi-language tier three or more. Not everything has to be translated either: services, case studies and contacts are needed in every language, while blog posts can stay in the language of the readers they were written for.