YOU'VE decided to take the plunge. No more cookie-cutter IR website for you!

You're going to build a high-end, engaging, customized destination for your shareholders and potential investors. Rather than looking like every other site on the Web, this one will be unique and highlight your company's distinctiveness as an investment.

So where do you start? Well, before you set about hiring a web development team or identifying data vendors, you need to know how you want your new site to look. And not just what fancy graphics to include on your IR homepage, but what the basic structure of your site will be.

How you structure your new site will determine the success or failure of the project. A poorly structured site leads directly to poor user experience. Poor user experience impacts how people will perceive your company. And since managing perceptions is one of the main priorities of investor relations, you simply have to get your site structure right.

This article explains one of the most important techniques we use in our practice to develop blueprints for IR websites. If you're contemplating a site redesign or planning to build a new site from the ground up, then this article is for you. If you have no plans for either, then we suspect that by the end of this article you will have changed your mind.

Good site design focuses on the user
Many companies make the mistake of structuring their sites according to what is important to them. Mistakes of this nature are common on IR sites and occur in ways that aren't always obvious until they're pointed out.

We'll show you a common example of poor site structure later, but first the point needs to be made that good site structure is externally focused. It should be shaped by the needs and motivations of the people who will be using the site.

A user-centered approach to site architecture means you have to know something about who is going to use your site. It also means that there is no one right way to structure a site since the precise makeup of individual companies' current and/or desired investor audiences will differ.

Of course, a site cannot completely be skewed to the interests of external audiences alone. The company itself will have its own opinions about what is important. These two conflicting agendas have to be carefully balanced, and we have devised in our practice a simple tool to do this.

Define your audience
At its most basic, all investor relations website audiences consist of two major groups: those who own your stock, and those who don't. You can further break down each of these major groups into a number of subgroups as shown in the table below.

Notice that we include all employees in the owners group. That's because they are as familiar with your company as most shareholders.

In the non-owners section we include indirect shareholders in the individual subgroup. This includes anyone who owns your stock but who is not familiar with your company, such as passive broker-assisted retail shareholders and members of pension committees whose shares are managed by an intermediary.

While this audience breakdown serves our purposes for this article, it is somewhat simplistic. If you are working for a large multinational organization, you should also do a geographic breakdown for each subgroup. The geographic makeup of your audience will influence a number of important design and editorial decisions, such as spelling out the month in all dates and reducing page sizes to compensate for trans-Atlantic downloading.

It's also worthwhile delving deeper into the precise composition of your institutional investor audience. Some will be more interested in company activities than others. Index fund managers, for instance, are much less likely to care than active managers.

At the end of it all, your IR site should be structured to meet the needs of all of your audiences. This is obviously no easy task since each group and subgroup will have somewhat different motivations and interests when visiting your IR website.

Owners, for example, should be familiar with your company and therefore have little need for basic information explaining what your company does. Non-owners are more likely to know little or nothing about what you do, so the same information will be important to them.

Of course, there are also commonalities between audience groups and subgroups. These, too, will influence how you build your website, though less so its structure than the nature of the content that will ultimately populate it.