What to Check on a Corporate Website

Home, about, services, blog, work, careers. That row sits ready in a great many templates. If the company's work does not fill the row, the pages stay empty or repeat one another's sentences. A visitor is not looking for a complete menu. They are looking for an answer to their own question.

The person who walks the list should not be someone who already knows the company. Someone who knows the work finishes the missing sentence in their head. The list means something in the hands of a person opening the site for the first time. If that person can separate three things, the page has done its job: what work happens here, whether that work is for them, and what the next step is.

The three questions do not have to be three banners. They have to be findable on the first screen, without scrolling. A word from the company's private language does not count as an answer. Solutions is not the name of a job. The name of the job is the sentence a customer would use.

A page stays because it describes work the company actually does. If there is nothing to tell, the page is not opened. A coming-soon line is a promise the visit cannot use. A blog swells the list when there is no habit of writing. A careers page does the same when there is no open role.

A visitor does not trust the site as a mood. They look at what they can check. A city or an address, when the work happens in a place. A phone that is answered, or a reply that comes back. The lock in the address bar. web.dev writes that HTTPS protects the site and avoids the browser's not-secure warning. The lock does not say the text is true. It says the address bar belongs to the company.

The question for a photograph is whether the same image could sit on another company's page. If it could, it does not tell the visitor that this work belongs here. Stock photography is not forbidden. Where it is interchangeable, it does not produce trust. A frame from the company's own work says more than an adjective in the menu.

A form's job is to carry what was typed to a person. What happens after send should be visible: a thank-you line, a number, a reply within a stated stretch of time. A button that stays silent does not tell the visitor whether the form worked.

If a name and a phone number are asked for, the page should let the visitor read what happens to that information. The exact sentences depend on the rules that apply to the company. This article does not draft them. It also does not treat their absence as normal. A form that hides the text behind a ticked box collects a reflex, not consent.

The W3C describes accessibility this way: people with disabilities can perceive, understand, and use the page too. On a form, that means each field has a label, and an error is read beside the field. A box that only changes colour does not tell everyone that something went wrong.

Google writes that it crawls the mobile version of a site with the smartphone agent for indexing and ranking. If a corporate page holds together on a wide screen and breaks on a phone, both the visit most people make and the version Google reads are broken. The phone walk itself is in the mobile compatibility test. The threshold here is only this: a page treated as finished on a desktop, which cannot finish the same job on a phone, does not close the list.

The W3C's design notes ask that text can be enlarged, that contrast can be read, that colour does not carry meaning alone, and that navigation stays consistent. A menu that opens only when a pointer hovers, a heading whose words are baked into an image, and a pale grey line that disappears in sunlight are where those notes often snag. A full accessibility audit does not get replaced by this list. Those three are visible on the walk.

The walk is useful when someone who does not know the company does it. Each item closes with yes or no. An item that stays no is not hidden. Either the page is fixed, or that promise comes off the page.

The list has no price. What enlarges a quote is in the piece on what website cost depends on. A page built for a single offer, carrying the sentence of an ad, is not the whole corporate site. That job is separated in the landing page article. At N2 Creative we think it is right, in site and software work, to walk this before drawing pages. That is an order of work, not a delivery contract.