14 Essentials for a Business Website Design

If you’re like many business owners, website design might not be your specialty. However, you don’t need to be a web design expert to be aware of what makes a great business website.

We’ve listed everything you need to know about web design as a business owner in this post. Forget about floating numbers, tags, elements, variables or complex custom codes…

Learning the essentials of website design will be beneficial for you if you are planning to get a new website or if you want your existing website to convert more.

Here are the 14 web design essentials every business website must-have below.

Key Factors for a Great Business Website Design

1) Clean and Easy-To-Use Website Navigation

Navigation is one of the fundamentals even if you are stepping into the online world even with a single-page website. Consider the natural development of your business.

What information do you want to highlight? What do you want visitors to your site to see first? Does the flow make sense?

Designers call this part “wireframing”(a kind of basic editing design), which is the detailed planning of your website.

Make a solid start to your digital presence by formulating a schematic that is conducive to development. If you can’t keep up with the development of your business, a website that is not open to growing will be the last thing you want!

When your website is completed, be sure to have clear and concise navigation tags for additional pages.

A well-designed web page will attract visitors to your web page over the life of your business.

2) Website Speed

Having a website with high page-loading speed will substantially improve the user experience. A considerable number of users will leave a website with poor performance, pretty quickly.

A high performance website will bring lower bounce rates, higher dwell time, and much better conversion rates!

Furthermore, Google cares about website speed. Speeding a business website will get better rankings and visitors. Now, let’s take a look at the SEO aspect of the website design with a bit more detail.

3) SEO-Ready Website Design

Seearch engine optimization(SEO) helps businesses use to drive organic traffic to their websites. An SEO friendly web design can help businesses to increase sales. However, driving visitors to a business website is not enough. Those visitors must be relevant, who are interested in your products or services.

Google uses more than 200 factors while deciding which website will rank higher or lower on the search results. The content, website speed, technical SEO, mobile-friendliness, backlinks, SSL certificate, SEO friendly URL structure, and properly used images are just some of these factors.

During the website design process, all of the on-site SEO factors should be taken into consideration for an SEO-friendly and thus converting website.

4) Content Management System

A content management system(CMS) such as WordPress, makes it extremely easy to manage and update a business website. And without any knowledge of programming or computer science.

WordPress web design offers many useful features and a solid foundation. With an easy-to-use interface, a CMS makes adding new products or services, updating existing info, publishing content, and uploading media are easy for everyone.

5) Proper Colour Palette for Website Design

Choose a colour palette for your website design that matches your business’s corporate colour scale. No problem if you haven’t chosen your tones yet.

Web sites are like white canvases, which you can throw away and start again if things don’t go as expected.

Check out the different options to see which colour tones work best together.

6) Eye-catching Images

Carefully selected images and photos that appeal to your business and your brand will have a great impact on your website.

Don’t you have any images? No problem. You got a few options here.

• Hire a professional photographer to get high-quality photos of your business premises and the team.
• You may work with a graphic designer to get custom made illustrations for your website.
• You can use paid or free stock images. However, if you opt to use stock images, your images won’t be unique. Furthermore, if you use the free ones, your options will be quite limited.

Use eye-catching and unique visuals to keep your website visitors from leaving your page. Increasing dwell time and lowering the bounce rate is surely great for conversions.

7) Call to Actions (CTA)

How the call to actions (CTA) are used on a website can determine if customers convert. You want a simple but strong CTA that will convince people to act.

There are two main purposes of a CTA:

• Tell visitors what they should do,
• Give them a rational or emotional motive to do so.

Remember, effective call to actions require some test and practice. Don’t be afraid to try again and again until you find a good one.

8) Mobile-Friendly Website Design

Your website design must be mobile-friendly. Why? 

• 79% of UK adults have a smartphone.
• Brits spend more than 2:30 hours online on their smartphones every single day, on average.
• Researches show that consumers are comfortable with mobile commerce and share of the mobile transactions increases rapidly.
• 73% of consumers will just leave a poorly designed mobile site to a competitive website that is mobile-friendly makes purchasing easier, according to a Google study.
• And around 67% of smartphone users are more likely to purchase from brands whose mobile sites or apps offer a personalized experience based on their geographic location, such as showing a nearby store where a product is in stock.
• It’s also a great way to start climbing up the search engine result pages when you want to bring more organic traffic to your website. Mobile-friendly websites perform better on Google search results as well.

9) Important Information About Your Business

Remember the basics. We’re talking about your business here – make sure you include all the vital information about your business on your website.

The last thing you want to do is to make sure you add important details after you create a beautiful website.

Is your shop open on Saturdays? Do you close early on holiday? Do you only receive special orders in person?

Make sure that this information is clear and visible. The less confusion is the better.

10) Social Media Presence

Once you have a great website, the next step is to promote your company via SEO, social media and PPC.  If you want to run a successful and up-to-date business, you must have a strong presence in social media.

Utilizing platforms like Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, Youtube, and Pinterest is a must for all businesses that will step into the online business world.

So, what do you need?

• Social icon links into your business accounts. These can be placed on the main navigation or footer. (Or both!) These links will help your visitors to easily find your social media pages.
• Social share links that appear on your blog posts or pages can increase the social share. This way, you can connect more with your customers and increase website traffic.

Don’t leave the development of your business unfinished by leaving the world of social media aside.

Almost everyone uses such networks to share ideas and discover information about products and services.

11) Contact Information

Share your contact information conveniently and simply. Don’t provide your address and contact information in a visual. Do not provide them in the background.

Don’t make it difficult for your website visitors and search engine bots to find important information. And if possible, obtain a professional email address to reassure your customers.

12) Reliable Web Hosting

When building a house, you first want to make sure that the foundation is solid. The same applies to create a website.

You will need a web hosting plan that will meet both your current and future needs. You want a plan that can grow with you or has the potential to update easily.

Do your research and choose a good hosting platform, having expert customer service.

When you realize that there is a crack in your foundation, the last thing you want is that there is no one around to offer a solution.

13) Website Security

Even if you are not yet ready to sell a product, investing in web security will be an important way to show your customers that their information is protected.

14) Landing Pages

A landing page is the first page a potential customer views. A conversion-focused page needs to be a sales funnel. However, it should never make a visitor feel like they’re being pushed into buying an item. Creating landing pages that are optimised for better sales is a vital part of the web design process.

What you should pay attention to when it comes to designing a landing page? Less is more. A cluttered page with too many elements and information can distract or confuse your visitors. You should make the page as easy to read and understand .

Using enough white space improves the design. White space is the empty space between the text, images and buttons on the page. You can use white space to divide paragraphs or a page into sections, so you can create clearer and cleaner pages.

That’s it! We’ve listed the 14 essential features a converting business website should have. Hope you enjoyed.

We offer web design in Edinburgh and across the UK. Our approach is to apply these best practices for all of our clients.