Investor Relations Website Design for publicly traded companies has many considerations to consider and require additional features than a typical business website would.
OTC PR Group websites are designed for results. As a market leader in Investor Relations websites, we know how to convey your story in a way that engages investors and differentiates you from your peers. Leverage industry best practices, leading design trends, and a best-in-class user experience with an experience customized to your needs.
IR website design and shareholder communication is our specialty. We believe companies need to control domain and website content and not outsource these too costly third-party vendors.
Our investor relations firm approach provides an immersive experience for investors and analysts while significantly reducing the costs for issuers. We provide the latest designs to data-driven content strategy and comprehensive SEO practices that you own.
All our investor relations websites built to ADA WCAG 2.1 AA, GDPR, CCPA, HTTPS secure, and mobile responsive. You will enjoy the industry’s only proactive client services that are U.S. based.
Let’s face it; why would you spend thousands of dollars having a third party developer own your domain and website. Not only is this not wise, but virtually impossible to create and control your brand and SEO driven content.
Mobile-Friendly investor relations website design, SEO, using relevant Social Media outlets that fit into the company’s IR strategy, and keeping up with regulations and disclosure are all part of the list.
It’s not just the general public that locates you on the web to keep in mind; you must consider potential investors, current shareholders, analysts, and journalists. It’s essential to have your investor relations website design updated and in real-time when it comes to press releases. Regulatory filings, financials, and press release links should be in place, ensuring that they are easily visible and categorized. Use the site to archive documents and presentations in chronological order –as it is helpful to the user to see context and history.
One should never forget that the IR section is an important marketing tool to educate, increase stock visibility, and promote the company. A good investor relations website design should describe the company’s story and investment proposition clearly. It should feature essential aspects such as the business’s milestones, leadership, and any other relevant information that can paint a picture in the potential investors’ minds of who the company is and where they are going.
Try to maintain corporate brand identity; this will ensure a seamless experience for the reader and end-user – from colors and logos to the general look and feel. Use pictures, graphics, charts, and videos, and podcasts where possible – it’s easier to understand. We all know that multimedia is slightly more interesting than static words on a page!
Investor Relations Website Design and Mobile Devices
Ensure the IR section is optimized for reading on any mobile or handheld device. Gone are the days when information is just viewed on desktops – now it’s laptops, tablets, smartphones, and other devices.
Responsive vs. Mobile-Friendly Websites: What’s the Difference?
One of the more common requests we’re getting these days is for responsive website development, and that’s a good thing because there are some great benefits to going with a responsive site. However, this also seems to be a common area of confusion. We’ll start by sharing some of the frequent misconceptions we encounter when talking to clients about responsive and mobile-friendly websites:
- Only responsive websites work on mobile devices.
- Every website needs to be responsive.
- A mobile-friendly website is responsive.
So what exactly do “responsive” and “mobile-friendly” mean? Let’s take a closer look.
Responsive Design
A responsive website responds (or changes) based on the needs of the users and the device (mobile device in this example) that they’re viewing it on. Here, text and images change from a three-column layout to a single column display. Unnecessary photos are hidden, so they don’t interfere with the more critical information on the site’s smaller display.
If you are on a computer, you can tell if a site is responsive by reducing your browser’s window size from the full screen down to very small. If the text’s appearance, images, and menu change, as you get smaller, the site is responsive.
Key features of responsive websites:
- Dynamic content that changes
- Navigation is condensed
- Optimized images
- Correct padding and spacing
- Reliant on mobile operating systems to function
Mobile-Friendly Design
A mobile-friendly website is one that is designed to work the same way across devices. This means that nothing changes or is unusable on a computer or mobile device. Features like navigation drop-downs are limited, as they can be challenging to use on mobile. And no Flash animation is used. The website is the same across the board, with no usability concerns regardless of the device on which it is being viewed.
Key features of mobile-friendly:
- Static content that doesn’t change
- Simplified navigation
- Images display smaller
- Not reliant on a mobile operating system to function properly
How to know which is right for you?
Well, we’re going to break it down for you with a helpful little checklist…
Responsive
You can achieve a more customized mobile experience with responsive design. However, it does require expertise, proper planning, and a bit larger budget.
Think about going responsive if:
- A large majority of your web traffic is viewing your site from a mobile device – at least 35 percent
- You have complex site content or features that are difficult to use on a mobile device
- You plan on your website having a longer shelf life and want it to appear up-to-date for longer
Mobile-Friendly
You can achieve a consistent website experience across all devices with a simplified, mobile-friendly site. These sites may not have crazy features or functionality, but they just work.
Think about going mobile-friendly if:
- You don’t have a huge mobile audience looking at your site on mobile – less than 35 percent
- You have a simple site that is mostly text and image based, without complex functionality
- Your image sizes are small, allowing for fast loading over mobile connections
Investor Relations Website Design and Search Engine Optimization
Search engine optimization is nowadays more important than ever. Every PR specialist must understand the true meaning of SEO and its potential for every business.
What is SEO?
Search engine optimization, or SEO in short, is a set of rules that can be followed by website (or blog) owners to optimize their websites for search engines and thus improve their search engine rankings.
It is also a great way to increase the quality of their web sites by making them user-friendly, faster, and easier to navigate.
SEO can also be considered as a framework since the whole process has many rules (or guidelines), a number of stages, and a set of controls.
Why is SEO important?
In today’s competitive market, SEO marketing is more important than ever. Search engines serve millions of users per day looking for answers to their questions or solutions to their problems.
Search engine optimization is essential because:
- The majority of search engines users are more likely to click on one of the top 5 suggestions in the results pages (SERPS), so to take advantage of this and gain visitors to your website or customers to your online store you need to in the top positions.
- SEO is not only about search engines, but good SEO practices improve the user experience and usability of a web site.
- Users trust search engines, and having a presence in the top positions for the keywords the user is searching increases the web site’s trust.
- SEO is good for the social promotion of your web site. People who find your website by searching Google or Yahoo are more likely to promote it on Facebook, Twitter, or other social media channels.
- SEO is essential for the smooth running of a big web site. Web sites with more than one author can benefit from SEO directly and indirectly. Their direct benefit is an increase in search engine traffic, and their indirect benefit is having a common framework (checklists) to use before publishing content on the site.
- SEO can put you ahead of the competition. If two web sites are selling the same thing, the search engine optimized web site is more likely to have more customers and make more sales.
Investor Relations Website Design and Social Media Considerations
Consider the use of relevant social media and decide if it fits into the company’s IR strategy. Twitter, LinkedIn, and other platforms can help individual companies communicate their IR message and relevant content to various audiences.
Be open to new and creative ways to use investor relations to paint your company in the best light. Who would have thought that Twitter would be a good medium to communicate investor relations content to relevant stakeholders ten years ago?
Ensure that the visitor can leave personal contact information and opt into an email distribution list to receive regular company news or updates.
Everyone has their own opinion on what makes a great Investor Relations Website Design—keeping in mind that the IR section has essential main functions, namely to keep the information updated regularly. The presentation and execution of this can vary greatly. Working with an experienced IR firm can make this difficult job much more manageable.
At OTC PR Group, we provide a full suite of investor relations firm services utilizing the latest web and SEO solutions coupled with relationship building processes to develop and maintain interest from your shareholder base. We work to build shareholder value by engaging with key-stakeholders and effectively following up and communicating your message, investment potential, and corporate vision.