Business Website Design: Essential Tips for a Professional Site

A business website enables you to reach your target audience and boost brand recognition. That said, poor web design can hinder your professional reputation and make it difficult to drive conversions.

That’s why it’s important to understand the foundations of good business website design. This typically involves simple layouts, easy navigation, and consistent branding. Better yet, it’s straightforward to implement these practices using a flexible website builder platform.

In this post, we’ll dive straight into six tips for business website design. Then, we’ll show you the simplest way to design business websites. Let’s get started!

6 Key Tips for Effective Business Website Design

There are a few important things to consider when it comes to designing a business website. You’ll need to establish a strong brand identity, build trust with new customers, and maximize sales (or conversions).

With that in mind, here are six expert tips for creating a professional website for your small business.

#1. Simplify Layouts

When trying to impress visitors, it’s tempting to rely on flashy features and animations. However, this is a surefire way to overwhelm customers and distract them from your company’s mission and services.

So, when it comes to business website design, less is more. We recommend opting for simple business website templates that let your products and services take center stage.

You should also leverage whitespace when creating a professional website. Essentially, this refers to blank space on the page. While it can sound counterintuitive, whitespace plays a key role in simple web design.

For starters, it adds a sense of balance and harmony to your website. It also ensures that your content is easy to read. You could use it to highlight key areas like call-to-action (CTA) buttons or contact forms.

#2. Accelerate Loading Times

In today’s digital world, customers don’t have the patience to deal with slow websites. In fact, data shows that the bounce rate increases by 32 percent as a page’s loading time goes from 1 to 3 seconds.

If the page doesn’t load fast enough, visitors might just exit your site and look for a better offer elsewhere. This will result in traffic and/or revenue loss and also damage your online reputation.

To make your business website load faster, you’ll want to opt for a lightweight page builder. It’s also important to compress your images before loading them to your website, as large image files will make your site slower.

#3. Streamline Navigation

Good design helps people quickly find what they’re looking for on your site. Many customers lack the time or patience to spend ages trawling your website before they get where they need to be.

No matter which web page visitors land on, they should be able to access their desired destination within 1-3 clicks. A streamlined layout can certainly assist with this goal, but you should also be thinking about your website’s navigation.

Large or complex business websites use mega menus where every link is visible, but this can clutter up your business website design.

It might be better to utilize neat dropdown menus, with pages organized into suitable categories. This also helps search engines to index your website more efficiently.

#4. Optimize for Search Engines

We can’t talk about business website design without touching on search engine optimization (SEO). By following SEO best practices, you can design a small business site that ranks well in the search engine results pages.

The best SEO strategies begin with thorough keyword research, which helps you target key terms and phrases that real users are searching for.

For example, an online fashion boutique might want to rank for terms like “women’s fashion” or “women’s clothes”.

Keywords aren’t the only way to gain favor with search engines. Website speed plays a key role in SEO, as does mobile responsiveness and backlinks. All of these factors maximize exposure for your site, enabling you to drive more organic traffic to your pages.

#5. Keep Branding Consistent

When you set up your own website, you need to see it as an extension of your overall brand. That means your business website design needs to stay consistent with the colors, fonts, logo, and other visual elements that you use in your offline and online marketing resources.

This is one of the easiest ways to establish a strong brand identity, which can make your small business more recognizable. However, cohesive branding is also integral if you’re hoping to establish credibility and build trust with your audience.

It’s therefore important to choose a website builder that gives you a lot of customization options. You should be able to apply your color palette and custom fonts, upload your own photos and designs, and more.

#6. Place Elements Strategically

Earlier, we discussed the benefits of keeping design elements to the bare minimum. Any business website should have contact forms and details, CTA buttons, and any other essential information.

The best business website templates display these elements prominently on the page so they’re easily accessible. Typically, they sit above the fold, which is the section of your website that visitors first see (without scrolling down).

For example, you might place your CTA button in the main navigation menu, and display your contact details in the header.

This contributes to a great user experience (UX) and also makes it easy for customers to complete the desired action, whether it’s signing up to your mailing list or making an appointment.

The Simplest Way to Design Business Websites

Many business owners think that they need to hire a web designer to launch a successful online store. However, this can be expensive and you might not have full control over your website.

Instead, you should opt for a flexible website builder like HeroBuilder. This way, you can access beautiful business website templates that you can easily customize to suit your needs:

HeroBuilder creates your business website in WordPress: a powerful content management system that gives you full customization freedom.

It’s powered by AI and generates your website within minutes. All you need to do is provide some information about your company, like your industry and goals.

HeroBuilder will then create your site based on your preferences and needs. You can also choose the pages you want on your website, like Testimonials, FAQ, Pricing, and Services:

HeroBuilder gives you a tailored selection of business website templates. Once you choose a design, you’ll be able to customize the site using the intuitive WordPress Site Editor.

For instance, you can change the fonts, colors, and layouts:

You can also remove objects, rearrange items, and add new blocks like buttons, images, and forms.

Note that HeroBuilder pre-installs all the tools you need to run your site. This includes WooCommerce if you’re setting up an online store.

You can use the free website builder for four days and your site will be hosted on a NameHero subdomain. Once the free trial is up, you’ll be able to upgrade to a paid plan and use a custom domain name (which is highly recommended for business websites).

Conclusion

Simple and professional design is important for business websites. It helps you showcase your products/services properly, build trust with new customers, and improve brand awareness.

To recap, here are six tips for effective business website design:

1. Simplify layouts.
2. Accelerate loading times.
3. Streamline navigation.
4. Optimize for search engines.
5. Keep branding consistent.
6. Place elements strategically.

The key to good business website design is using an intuitive website builder like HeroBuilder. You can start with a free business website and then upgrade to one of our affordable plans, which include email accounts and other essential tools. Get started for free today!