- A company website has at least four groups of visitors: clients, procurement, job applicants, and investors or partners.
- Each group should find its answer on a phone within one minute. A page that can't answer is the page to fix first.
- Behind the pages you need a system your team can edit, forms that reach the person who has to reply, and someone looking after security.
- Before ordering a new website, run the one-minute test on the old one. Sometimes fixing three or four pages is enough.
Four groups open a company website, each with its own first question
At ten in the morning, an office lobby holds a client, someone from a buyer's procurement team, a job applicant and a guest of the managing director. The receptionist knows who goes to which room. A company website is a lobby with no receptionist, so each page has to lead people to their answer on its own.
The rule we use from here on: a visitor has to find the answer to their first question on a phone within one minute. If it takes longer, or means opening a PDF and zooming in, count that page as not answering yet. The one-minute limit is our own rule, not a research finding. We chose it because it is easy to test.
B2B buyers looking for a supplier
Usually an engineer with your site open next to two or three other suppliers. They want to know whether you make what they need, and whether you have done it for a company like theirs.
Procurement registering a new supplier
They need the registered company name, the tax ID, the head office address and certificates that haven't expired. If they can't find them, the paperwork slips by several days.
Job applicants
They want to know whether the position is still open, where the job is, and how long the company keeps applications. A job ad left up for two years tells them nobody looks after this page.
Investors, banks and partners
They check who runs the company, when the latest news is dated, and whether what the website says matches what the executives say in the meeting room.
Page by page: who opens it and what they must find in one minute
Open your site on a phone and go down the rows, or hand the table to whoever builds the new site as part of the brief.
| Page | Who opens it | What they must find within one minute | Common mistake |
|---|---|---|---|
| Home | Everyone | A first sentence that says what you do and for whom, with paths to services, portfolio and contact | Rotating slides and a slogan that would fit any company |
| About | Procurement, investors | Registered name, tax ID, location, and certificates with expiry dates | A long history with no facts in it |
| Services or products | B2B buyers | One page per main service, with specs and a quote button | Specs buried in a PDF |
| Portfolio | B2B buyers | The brief, what was done and the result, grouped by industry | A row of logos with no story |
| Team and management | Investors | Names, titles and real photos of the people who make decisions | People who left long ago |
| Careers | Job applicants | Open positions, posting dates, how to apply, and a privacy notice | Closed positions still listed |
| News | Investors, clients | Dated news, including some from this year | Latest news from three years ago |
| Contact | Everyone | Channels split by topic (sales, procurement, jobs) and a map | One form into a shared inbox nobody opens |
| Privacy and cookies | Procurement, job applicants | A notice under Thailand's PDPA that matches the data the site actually collects, and a cookie banner you can decline | Copied wholesale from another site |
The row people most often forget is the company's legal details; putting them in the footer of every page is enough. The row that costs the most when it goes wrong is Contact: a buyer who has made up their mind but can't reach you will call the next supplier. News and a separate team page can wait if nobody is there to keep them up to date.
The system behind the pages, so the answers are still right next year
Company websites tend to be correct on launch day and then go out of date one page at a time. What stops that is the system behind the site and a named person for each page.
A back end your team can edit
A CMS (content management system) lets your team add pages, change photos and close job ads without writing code. Before choosing one, agree on who edits which page: for example, HR looks after careers and marketing looks after news and the portfolio.
Multiple languages, when people actually read them
Each language gets its own address, such as /en/, with hreflang tags that tell Google which page is the same page in another language. AI can draft translations quickly, but someone who knows both the language and the product should check them before they go live. For five languages on one site, see our multilingual corporate website page.
Forms that reach the person who has to reply
Have visitors choose a topic in the first field, then send each topic to the person responsible. Keep every submission in a CRM and send a confirmation email that says who will get back to them and when. The marketing consent box has to be separate from the submit button and must not be ticked in advance.
Speed, SEO and analytics
Each page has its own title and description, text is real text rather than words inside an image, and images are compressed so they load fast on a phone, because Google and AI assistants read your site too. Under the PDPA, analytics and advertising cookies should run only after the visitor consents. The number worth checking every month is how many forms come in from each page.
Security, and who looks after the site after launch
An outdated CMS or plugin is an easy way in for attackers. Agree before launch who updates the system and who takes backups, and make sure the domain is registered in your company's name. Other questions to ask whoever builds the site are in how to choose a web development company or software house.
For the development team · Pre-launch checks for a company website
The "good" thresholds for Core Web Vitals are LCP within 2.5 seconds, INP within 200 milliseconds and CLS within 0.1, at the 75th percentile. Every page has its own title, meta description and canonical. The home page carries Organization structured data, and multilingual pages carry a full hreflang set with x-default. You can add FAQPage markup, but since August 2023 Google shows FAQ rich results mainly for well-known government and health sites, so don't promise them to the client. Analytics cookies use Consent Mode with denied as the default.
Hypothetical case
An electrical control panel manufacturer in Samut Prakan (name and details invented) planned a new website because the old one looked dated. Before calling anyone in, the sales manager ran the one-minute test with four colleagues.
The colleague playing the client found the right panel model in 40 seconds, but a test quote request got its reply three days later from accounting, because the form went to a shared inbox. Procurement couldn't find the tax ID, the applicant found a job ad that had already closed, and the partner saw news from three years ago.
The last three were fixed in one afternoon. The form was the part that needed investment, so the company built its brief for the new site around form routing first, not the look.
The one-minute test takes a single morning
Before hiring anyone to build a new site, test the old one with four people and one phone.
One-minute test per visitor
- Step 1 Write each group's first question in that group's own words, for example "Is your ISO 9001 certificate still valid?"
- Step 2 Find people who have never edited the site Whoever built it already knows where everything is.
- Step 3 Start from Google on a phone Search for the company name and click through from the results, the way an outsider would.
- Step 4 Time it and give no directions Note where they hesitate and where they give up. If there's a form, submit it once for real and see who answers.
- Step 5 Rank the fixes Start with the group closest to revenue, then test again after fixing.
The test tells you whether people who reach the site find their answers. Whether people can find the site at all is a question for Search Console.
Build a new site, or fix the old one?
If the problem is the content, fix the old site. If the problem is the structure or the back end, fixing it page by page never ends.
Build a new site if any of these apply
- Your team can't edit text themselves, so every change waits for the developer
- You can't add a language or a new service page without rebuilding the structure
- The site breaks on mobile, or the back end no longer gets updates
- The forms can't connect to your CRM
If several apply at once, the back end has to be planned together with the look, which is the job of a multilingual company website with a CMS. What drives the budget is covered in what website and app development costs depend on. If the old site has pages that rank on Google, read redesigning a company website without losing Google rankings before design starts.
We start a company website from the people who answer each question
The information a company website has to give is spread across departments. The tax ID sits with accounting, job openings with HR, product specs with the engineers or in the ERP. DNA Maker talks to these people one department at a time and writes down what question each page answers, where the master copy of the information lives, who edits it, and where each form topic goes. We then turn that list into workflow, routing rules and screens.
Our team in Bangkok designs and builds the site ourselves, with no subcontracting. The site runs on a CMS your team can edit and publish from, supports up to five languages, and sends quote requests into your CRM with a LINE alert to the sales rep responsible. SEO structure is planned from the wireframe stage, and after launch we review analytics with you every month. Details are on our company website development page, and other kinds of sites are under web development. If you've run the test, send us the results and we'll start from the pages that can't answer yet.
SOFTWARE ENGINEERING GLOSSARY
Software engineering glossary
| Term | What it is | A simple example | What executives should ask the development team |
|---|---|---|---|
| CMS | A back end your team uses to edit website content without writing code | HR takes down a filled job ad in five minutes | Who can edit which page, and who approves? |
| CRM | A system that records clients and leads: who got in touch about what, and who took it on | A quote request lands in the system with the sales rep's name on it | Who sees a lead nobody has answered within a day? |
| Core Web Vitals | Google's measures of whether a page loads fast, responds quickly and stays still while loading | A large image loads so slowly that the contact button jumps away from your finger | Which pages still fail on mobile? |
| Cookie Consent | Asking permission before using cookies the site doesn't need in order to work | A banner with both Accept and Decline buttons | If someone declines, which cookies still run? |
| Privacy Notice | A notice saying what personal data the site collects, what for, and how long it is kept | A notice telling applicants how many months their applications are kept | Does it match what every form actually collects? |