An award-winning oil & gas website doesn’t have to break the bank
Erik Carlgren runs multimedia advertising design, graphic design, website technologies and annual report production for EnerCom Consulting. Carlgren and his team have almost 30 years of combined design experience and have completed approximately 50 oil and gas company websites. He says that an effective website comes down to three things: “It must be findable, searchable and compatible.”
Findability
Your website needs to be easily found by search engines like Google, BING and Yahoo. You have to understand your audience and their language. Whether they’re investors or operators, you need to ask yourself, “What search terms would my target audience use in order to find the services we offer?” This is particularly important for oilfield service companies that directly sell products and services. It is critical to have a good understanding of your audience to create the best SEO possible and therefore increase your website’s traffic.
Searchability
On the front end, you’re designing for the visitor’s positive experience. What information did a visitor come there to find? For public E&P companies, the people searching will be investors and prospective investors who need specific management and financial information about your company. At OilService companies it will likely be a combination of investors, customers and prospective customers.
“You want the user to have a great user experience on your website. In today’s business world, that means giving visitors the ability to find what they want quickly, intuitively, and in as few clicks as possible,” Carlgren says. “You don’t want to bury key information eight clicks deep within multiple menus. On IR websites, investors want to view current presentations and read recent news (among other things) so it makes sense to post those items front and center.” Carlgren said it also helps to re-enforce navigation bar links with direct links within the content of your site. If you are talking on your “About ABC Energy” page about your great management team, go ahead and include a hyper-link to your management team.
An OilService company would most likely want to highlight their services and locations. Their sales team’s contact information should also be easy to find and can be posted in multiple locations.
In addition, having an actual search bar on your website is no longer optional. Visitors expect it.
Compatibility
More and more people access websites through portable devices—smart phones of all types, tablets, pads, laptops—in addition to PCs or Mac desktop computers at the office. Mobile visitors can be 50%-60% of your website audience at any given time. You want your website to work flawlessly regardless of the device a visitor happens to be searching with.
“You typically want to strip down the content on mobile devices and remove larger images and sliders because mobile speeds are typically slower than that of a PC, and users with little or no time will give up quickly and simply move on. Not to mention, many mobile phone plans charge big fees for bandwidth and removing unwanted graphics will help keep your viewers’ phone bills lower,” Carlgren said.
How to Keep Website Costs Down
To keep design costs from escalating, Carlgren recommends doing as much advance planning as you can—on paper—before you unleash graphic designers and web designers to design and build your site. Why? Because making changes on paper is cheap, but after a design has been created and converted to HTML throughout the site, making design changes after that point means a costly start-over and committing to additional hours of design. There should always be a point-person to aggregate your company’s thoughts and direction as to avoid contradicting desires.
A few key things you want to determine well in advance are listed below. Answering these questions during the planning stage, can save your company a lot of time and costs later.
- What are our objectives for the website?
- Who is our desired audience?
- What message do we want to convey about our company with the design/look/theme of the site?
- How should we organize the site to give our audience quick, easy access to the information they seek?
- Will new graphics need to be created (logo/brand/image)?
- Is content for all the pages already available and written; if not who will gather all the information and write the content for each page of the website?
- Do we have specific technical requirements such as ecommerce capability or customer portals?
- Who is going to maintain and update the site after it has been launched?
Carlgren recommends that the company’s internal team do its best to answer the planning questions at the outset. “After you agree internally on the general basics of what you want the site to convey and how you want it to function for users, choose a design theme option that you like and then let the graphic and web designers customize as appropriate.”
Some of the websites that Carlgren and his design team have created are listed below:
Cabot Oil & Gas Corporation (ticker: COG): cabotog.com, a legacy independent E&P operating in the Eagle Ford and Marcellus shale.
Black Stallion Oil & Gas, Inc. (ticker: BLKG): blackstallionoil.com, an E&P working in the Alberta Basin Bakken in Montana.
Bennu Oil & Gas: bennuoil.com, a privately-owned E&P with deepwater assets in the Gulf of Mexico offshore Texas, Louisiana and Mississippi.
Strategic Oil & Gas Ltd. (ticker: SOG): sogoil.com, a Canadian E&P with operations in northern Alberta and British Columbia.
Refinery Specialties Inc.: rsichem.com, a privately-held OilService company that specializes in manufacturing customized oilfield chemicals and provides stimulation and frac services.
Buckhorn Energy Partners: buckhornenergy.com, a privately-held OilService company that specializes in treatment and disposal of solids and wastewater.
Further information about EnerCom Consulting’s website and graphic design services may be found here. Call Erik Carlgren, Art Director, EnerCom +1 303-296-8834 with questions about website design, annual report design and advertising design.
Important disclosures: The information provided herein is believed to be reliable; however, EnerCom, Inc. makes no representation or warranty as to its completeness or accuracy. EnerCom’s conclusions are based upon information gathered from sources deemed to be reliable. This note is not intended as an offer or solicitation for the purchase or sale of any security or financial instrument of any company mentioned in this note. This note was prepared for general circulation and does not provide investment recommendations specific to individual investors. All readers of the note must make their own investment decisions based upon their specific investment objectives and financial situation utilizing their own financial advisors as they deem necessary. Investors should consider a company’s entire financial and operational structure in making any investment decisions. Past performance of any company discussed in this note should not be taken as an indication or guarantee of future results. EnerCom is a multi-disciplined management consulting services firm that regularly intends to seek business, or currently may be undertaking business, with companies covered on Oil & Gas 360®, and thereby seeks to receive compensation from these companies for its services. In addition, EnerCom, or its principals or employees, may have an economic interest in any of these companies. As a result, readers of EnerCom’s Oil & Gas 360® should be aware that the firm may have a conflict of interest that could affect the objectivity of this note. EnerCom, or its principals or employees, may have an economic interest in any of the companies covered in this report or on Oil & Gas 360®. As a result, readers of EnerCom’s reports or Oil & Gas 360® should be aware that the firm may have a conflict of interest that could affect the objectivity of this report.
