Whether you run a fitness studio or a landscaping business, web design may feel outside your wheelhouse. Yet, you know how important it is to have a professional and well-optimized website to draw in customers and build trust.
Fortunately, there are a ton of web design tips that can make the process easier if you’re looking to improve your current website or create one from scratch.
In this article, we go over the best web design tips for small business owners so you can improve the look and overall experience of your website.
Table of Contents:
- How Do I Make My Website Look Professional?
- 8 Website Design Tips for Small Businesses
How Do I Make My Website Look Professional?
A professional and well-designed website is key to attracting customers to your small business. It takes seconds for someone to decide if they like your website. If visitors aren’t presented with a sleek and professional website that appears to have the information they’re looking for, they’ll quickly bounce.
The last thing you want is to drive traffic to your website just to have them leave in an instant because they don’t like the look or have a bad user experience.
A professional-looking website prevents this. When your website is designed not only for appearance but also with a smooth experience in mind, it immediately builds trust and credibility with potential customers.
So, how exactly do you make that happen? By following these tips for web design, your site will attract, inform, and convert customers in no time.
Ready to grow your business with a professional website? Durable’s AI Website Builder makes it easy.
8 Website Design Tips for Small Businesses
Ready to improve your website or create a new one for your business? Here are eight web design principles and tips to keep in mind as you build.
1. Create Consistent Branding
What’s one thing all great websites have in common? A strong brand identity.
If you already have branding for your marketing or business materials, make sure you carry it over on your website to tie it back to the business. If you don’t already have a brand identity, use your website as an opportunity to establish a cohesive look and feel.
And don’t worry, this doesn’t have to be an extensive project. If you’re only getting started, you can use a tool like Durable’s AI Brand Builder to generate your brand identity in 30 seconds.
Branding is everything from color palette to visuals to typography. It’s important to use the same brand style across your website to create a seamless look as visitors navigate from one page to another.
Tip: When it comes to typography, a good rule of thumb is to use no more than three fonts on your website. One should be used for the page titles and headings, one for subheadings, and one for the body copy. Any more than three starts to look messy and is harder for readers to consume.
Get started with your very own brand kit with Durable’s Brand Builder today.
2. Set Up Clean Navigation and Web Pages
Have you ever spent time clicking around on a website, unable to find the page you’re looking for? What’s worse, there isn’t a menu button that organizes all of the site’s pages, so you’re left feeling lost and frustrated.
You want to avoid this situation. Your website navigation should be easy to use. Clean and simple navigation involves setting up foundational web pages (with familiar page titles such as “About Us”) and creating a navigation menu for visitors to find these pages.
You don’t need many pages for your small business website. Here are the main ones every small business website should have:
- Homepage
- Contact
- About
- Services
All of the information your customers are looking for, such as hours, pricing, or customer testimonials, should be organized within those categories either as subpages or with body copy.
3. Establish a Clear Hierarchy
A strong visual hierarchy is a sign of a well-designed website. A “hierarchy” refers to the way each web page’s sections are organized to draw visitors’ attention to the most important elements.
Below is an example of a common way to style a homepage. Let’s break down the visual hierarchy and the included sections.
The top banner includes informational elements: business logo, navigation menu, and social icons. This is what a user expects on the top banner.
As your eyes scroll down, you see the main heading — a benefit that draws the target customer in — followed by a descriptive subheading. Next, you see the CTA button to book a free estimate, and it uses the same accent color as the top banner. All of this is overlaid across a high-quality relevant image.
There’s a reason most websites follow the same layout design and it’s because visual hierarchy is a proven web design principle. You don’t need to be a design expert to implement it on your small business website.
Using Durable’s AI Website Builder makes it easy to establish a visual hierarchy without any design know-how. Durable’s AI generates websites with customizable sections, pages, and widgets.
4. Craft Easy-to-read Copy
Your website copy is your chance to communicate your message, share information about the business, and address your customers’ pain points.
Website copy must be easy to read to convey this information effectively. Don’t feel pressured to fill every section of your website with copy. Embrace white space and stick with short, impactful copy to make a stronger impression on customers.
If you don’t consider yourself a wordsmith, embrace AI tools.
An AI tool like Durable can help you generate ideas for website copy you can edit to fit your voice and brand. Durable offers a convenient starting point so you don’t find yourself stuck staring at a blank web page.
When you build a website on Durable, everything from headings to taglines to CTA buttons will automatically generate based on your business industry. Here is an example of a copywriting business website made with Durable:
Plus, you can adjust the tone to fit your brand. Whether you want your website copy to sound authoritative or lighthearted, Durable’s AI tool generates new text until you’re satisfied with the tone and style.
5. Use Thoughtful Imagery
One of the best ways to show website visitors what your business offers is through images. Real-life results or action shots help people imagine how you can help them.
For example, if you offer home-building services, your website should showcase beautiful home transformations. If you’re a nutritionist, you could include bright images of fulfilling meals:
If you don’t have original images to use, use a stock photography website like Pexels, Tonl, or Unsplash to source high-resolution images that feature a range of diverse subjects.
When you create a Durable website, you can skip the image search phase. Durable’s AI sources and selects stock photos for you with the click of a button. And if you’re not happy with the selected photos, you can keep regenerating until you are.
6. Leverage SEO
A common question small business owners have when creating or improving their site is: How do I optimize my website design?
Optimizing your website for search entails conducting keyword research to determine what your customers are searching for, writing page titles that match these keywords, writing body copy that addresses the questions they’re searching for, and tweaking the technical aspects of your web pages, such as internal linking, load time, and meta descriptions. And that doesn’t even include ongoing maintenance to ensure your website stays at the top of the rankings.
That sounds like a lot of work, right? With Durable’s built-in SEO tools, you don’t have to worry about any of that. Your website is automatically optimized in the background.
SEO isn’t something to overlook, but it’s also not something a lot of business owners have the time for.
For busy entrepreneurs, the best solution is to use a website builder with built-in optimizations. Using a tool like Durable will give you confidence that your web pages are SEO-friendly, so you can spend less time thinking about keywords and more time focused on your business.
7. Make Your Website Mobile-Friendly
According to Statista, mobile devices generated over 58% of global website traffic in 2023.
What does this mean for small businesses? Your website must be mobile-friendly. Make sure to choose a responsive design — this means the website design will adapt to fit whatever device someone is viewing it on.
Most website builders also let you preview what your site design will look like on mobile, so take advantage of this feature. Make sure your website design doesn’t sacrifice any design elements or usability if a user is visiting from a mobile device instead of on desktop.
With Durable, all websites are automatically mobile-responsiveness. No testing or coding required.
8. Embrace Templates
Small business owners don’t have time to learn web design and craft a high-converting website from scratch. It can also be expensive to outsource to an expert designer. This is where website templates come in.
Using a website template is the easiest way to design a website with little experience. Templates offer premade designs that allow you to plug in your own content — from taglines to images — and launch your website in a matter of minutes.
Small business owners have enough on their plates as it is. Designing a professional website from scratch shouldn’t be one of them.
Durable makes it easy to get a well-designed, search-optimized website up and running in no time.
Build your website in one click with our AI Website Builder.
