Investor Relations - A Practical Guide - Investis

Usability
However good your content is, users will leave
your website quickly and with a negative
impression if the site suffers from poor usability.
Good usability is the sum of many parts, including
for example:
• A user-centric design, with good colour contrast
• A familiar, consistent navigation mechanism
• Simple structure with well-labelled content sections
• Homepage and landing pages with good
signposting
• Content pages that do not require too much
scrolling
• Archives that make it easy to find documents in
a choice of formats
• Orientation aids, like breadcrumb trails and
related links
• Fast page-load speeds
• Good coding, to ensure accessibility for all users
Functionality
The web is an interactive environment and there
are many useful tools you can provide to engage
and help your website visitors. Think about your
audience’s needs and how you can help them with
those. Some examples of features and tools you
might consider:
• Basics: Search, site map and print-optimised pages
• Data tools: Share price charting, KPI charting
tools, calculators, analyst estimates
• Maps and timelines: Interactive applications to
explain history and geographic presence in an
engaging way
• Alerts and reminders: E-mail and calendar alerts,
RSS news feeds
Ongoing management
How you are going to manage your site on an
ongoing basis is as important a consideration as
what to display in the first place. While some of
the content should be ‘evergreen’, there will be
plenty of content that needs regular checking and
updating to ensure it remains consistent with the
broader communications output.
Investors will notice quickly if content on a site is
not current or key announcements are not updated
simultaneously with market disclosure. They may
not complain, but they will stop regarding your
website as an authoritative source and you will
have lost control of your message. So establish
some governance rules for the website early on
and get buy-in from management about the
resources required and the responsibilities on an
ongoing basis. In addition, you should consider
periodically reviewing other quoted companies’
websites to benchmark if your own website is as
easy to use, informative and up-to-date as that of
your competitors. Remember, investors, analysts
and journalists who use company websites for
their research will notice and may be influenced by
such differences.
Conclusion
Websites are a critical part of the investor relations
toolkit: an opportunity (and an obligation with
respect to AIM companies under the AIM Rules
for Companies) to reach the widest investor
audience, to engage with them and to start building
valuable relationships. The most important success
factor is not the size of the budget you have, but
the commitment you make to treat it as a
communications platform. If you embrace it, you
will be rewarded.
Building the Investor Relations Programme 63