Designing an investor website is a balancing act between design, content, and compliance. It has to meet regulatory disclosure obligations, follow WCAG accessibility standards, and serve very different audiences who all want different things, quickly. It also has to perform in search, since most investors find a site through Google or another search engine.
Information architecture
IA structures digital content logically and consistently to ensure it is usable by everyone, including people with disabilities.
Visitors to a site will arrive with very specific requirements: find the latest results, check the share price, download the annual report, register for an event, read the latest RNS. The navigation should make each of those reachable in one or two clicks.
Institutional analysts, retail investors, and journalists have different needs. Analysts want raw data, models, and consensus. Retail investors want context, plain language, and visual summaries. Consider whether to surface different entry points or content depths for each.
Regulatory and disclosure requirements
UK-listed companies must meet the Listing Rules and a few core obligations. Market-moving announcements should be published without delay and archived. Annual and half-year reports need to remain available for at least ten years. AGM materials, notices, agendas, and voting results, should be easy to find. Companies operating across jurisdictions also need to consider US disclosure rules (for ADR programmes), local market requirements, and ESEF tagging for annual reports in Europe.
10yrs
Minimum period annual and half-year reports must remain publicly available
Data integration
Share price feeds, RNS, financial history, and event calendars should ideally come from a single source to avoid the inconsistencies that plague stitched-together IR sites. This is where Ticker fits in, we can provide investor tools and the data required to populate them.
Accessibility
WCAG 2.2 AA is the standard most listed companies aim for. In the UK public sector it’s a legal requirement under the 2018 accessibility regulations. Private companies aren’t legally bound but face increasing scrutiny under the Equality Act.
Key elements to get right:
- Sufficient colour contrast across the site
- Keyboard navigation
- Alt text on charts and images
- Accessible PDFs (a common failure point, financial reports are often inaccessible)
- Proper heading structure, H1–H6, creating a hierarchical outline allowing screen readers to navigate content
- Captions and transcripts on video
- Form labels, clearly identify all fields and interactive points within a form
- Publish an accessibility statement to detail all measures taken to support users
Performance and mobile
A growing share of traffic is mobile, so the site needs to be built with that in mind, working seamlessly across every device and browser. Pages should load quickly, charts should be interactive but lightweight, and PDFs shouldn’t be the only way to access key data.
Search, SEO, and discoverability
Investors often arrive via a search engine so a well constructed site, clean URLs, and proper metadata matter will help the search engines to make site content fully visible and available.
Privacy and cookies
Cookie banners and privacy notices need to follow data protection rules. Keep tracking to a minimum on pages where investors are accessing official company information.
A good investor website doesn’t treat accessibility, compliance, design, and discoverability as separate jobs. They all work towards the same goal: making the site easy to use for every visitor, whatever their accessibility needs.