Best Business Website Design Tips and Practices: Fonts, Navigation, UX, Inforgraphics, Mistakes and More

Nailing the right business website design is tricky, and comes with many different aspects to think about. Learn what’s necessary to get you started with this guide.

TechBear

Don’t think that the only thing you have to do is to create a website and be done with your online advertising strategy. Not only do you have to put some effort into the content that you want to present to the audience but the way your website looks and functions as well. Your site will be your main marketing tool. This is precisely why you have to give your business website design some thought. For starters, your website design doesn’t only impact your SEO and the overall look and feel of your company, but user experience as well. Actually, user-friendliness and functionality of your website may be the most important aspects that you need to consider when it comes to web design. What’s more, minimalism has become one of the biggest modern trends and not just when it comes to lifestyle. Even when website appearance is concerned, noise-free, minimal design is considered to be the best kind of look that attracts the audience these days. Not to mention that even though Mobilegeddon took its toll, plenty of websites still don’t use a mobile-friendly design. If you want to learn more about best business website design tips and tricks, keep on reading.

What you need to know about website design

The importance of web design for online marketing

Company web design is not just something that’s going to make your site look pretty. It’s important to be aware that, nowadays, prospective clients look for products/services online. That being said, your website will be the first impression they get about your whole brand. Therefore, if you want to make your brand memorable and recognizable as well as create a professional and trustworthy image, you need to make the most out of website design.

The effect of business website design

As a serious and professional company, you have to wow your clients with impressive solutions to their problems in a form of products/services. The first proof that you can actually deliver what they’re looking for will be your website or your website design. The way your site is designed can tell your prospective client what to expect from you. Just like your business, your website has to look truly impressive but still provide a user-friendly interface with simple navigation and flawless transitions.

Website design affects your online presence

The look and functionality of your site will be responsible for the first client impression. Therefore, it will automatically affect your online presence. What’s more, if you lack some obvious requirements such as responsive design or proper navigation and internal linking, your company website design will affect your search engine rank as well. This can be a serious issue for your visibility and the ability to generate more leads.

Website design works together with content

In order to make the website as attractive and functional as possible, professional website designers don’t only have to pay attention to the images, fonts, and placement, but the way it will all work with site content as well. In general, thanks to proper web design tactics and use of whitespace, special fonts, visuals, etc. the content can appear more prominent and compelling as well. For a business that’s trying to make a break among the competition, this is of utmost importance.

The importance of graphic design for your company website

Graphic design has to tell a story

These days it all comes down to the first impression. In general, show works a lot better than tell, even though you should use them together. That being said, it’s very important that you showcase your professionalism through sleek, smooth and easy-to-navigate website design. Moreover, your site’s layout has to be clean and noise-free. Finally, there’s nothing like great quality images and videos as well as 3D models to fully support your expertise.

Make the most out of 3D modeling

User-friendly, professional-looking web design with classy layout and theme, as well as simple interface with just enough whitespace is a golden standard for many professional websites. Therefore, apart from these essentials, you can spice up the graphic design for your company even more. As mentioned, 3D models would really contribute to professionalism, as well as a great first impression upon visiting your site. Of course, use this particular tip only if 3D modeling works for your specific business and niche.

Great graphic design makes for great branding

Most people who are active online these days find the visual impression quite important. This is often a deciding factor when it comes to conversion as well. That being said, using an appropriate graphic design for your company means to make the design unique and special to your own brand. That way, people who see a striking and impactful logo together with branding colors and then confirm your authority through content, 3D models and easy access to your website’s info, will definitely find you a lot more trustworthy compared to other businesses who fail to utilize the visual aspect of their brand.

The importance of a logo for your brand

Create a connection with your audience

When you have a great logo for your brand, you’ll be able to deepen the connection with your target audience as well. That being said, not any logo can do that. If you want to make it truly special and unique, you have to put a lot of thought into it. Essentially, you want a logo that will present what you do and stand for in a creative, interesting and smart way. The logo should trigger an emotional reaction in your audience. Therefore, it’s important to run several tests of comparison before you settle for one final logo design.

A great logo can strengthen your brand’s personality

As mentioned, the design of your logo should be powerful enough to actually represent who you are and what you do as a business. People should be able to recognize and relate to the nature of your business through your logo. Unfortunately, it’s very easy to forget about this particular marketing essential when there are tons of other things to take care of. Still, the right logo for your brand can help you reach the top when the audience is concerned.

Using a proper logo makes you credible

Making the most out of a great logo for your brand can strengthen the credibility of your business. In general, people don’t only look at feedback and testimonials (even though this is very important as well) but your overall website presentation and branding, too. In that respect, it’s very important to create a logo that will be able to truly represent your brand’s credibility, professionalism, and trustworthiness.

How to pair website fonts in the most effective way?

It’s all about your target audience

You should be aware of the fact that your target audience may differ considerably. However, even though this may be a small issue, you still need to consider the audience when choosing your website typography. After all, you are trying to present your services and your business to prospects and they are the ones who need to find the font pairings attractive and enjoyable. You may think that fonts don’t actually affect UX all that much, but that’s far from true. In general, the way you pair website fonts can make people want to read more about you and browse your site for more content, or, it can irritate them and make them leave your site relatively quickly.

Different ways to pair website fonts

There’s no specific rule when it comes to pairing fonts, but, in general, don’t try to stuff a bunch of different fonts at once. This can only confuse your audience. Moreover, while the fonts should be obviously different, they should still share some similarities in order to work well together. That being said, one of the best ways to pair website fonts is to pick ones from the same family. On the other hand, you can always play with contrast. Essentially, you can contrast your fonts in style, size, weight, and form.

Seek help from Google

Google always offers the best possible tools. So, if you’re not sure how to pair website fonts in the most effective way, Google can help you — as long as you use Google fonts, of course. Essentially, you can choose your favorite font that you want on your site 100%, click on it and then go to Google Webfonts Pairing Tool. This particular tool will suggest what the best font pairings are for the font you chose beforehand. Pretty neat, right?

Business website design: why use infographics?

Why use infographics in web design?

In general, people who look for content and information online want to learn more about the options they have but they still don’t want to spend too much time reading. It is a bit difficult to read plenty of text on the screen, even if you’re using a desktop computer. Because of that, more and more companies that want to share valuable content online decide to use infographics together with regular text. As mentioned, that way the info is digested easier and the users find the content more compelling.

What content should you use for infographics?

There’s no definite rule about the content that you can present in a form of an infographic. In general, it’s all about using the key facts that can boost your authority within your niche. That being said, you can utilize:

• Number of projects that your company completed
• Key points on the products/services that you provide
• Your overall ranking from the satisfied clients
• Other big companies that worked with you
• Anything that presents your USP

How to create effective infographics

In order to use infographics in your business website design in a way that will actually benefit you, you need to create effective infographics first. So, is there a special way to do that? Basically, you have to pay attention to three main elements. First, make sure that the content you use in infographics is interesting, unique and relevant to your company. Second, the content in infographics should never be too long. You need to capture the reader’s attention with 7 words max. Third, use the appropriate font. It is the font’s size and boldness that will tell the readers what the most important info is and what’s the description.

Best practices to follow for proper website navigation

Use understandable and obvious information structure

As mentioned, your website navigation should strive to provide ease of access to every piece of content that exists on your site. However, if you add content on a regular basis and even change the overall design of your site, chances are that your information structure is not clear enough and even outdated. Therefore, you need to create a sitemap that will clearly show where everything is. Then you need to revisit that map. This is all in order to ensure that all content is connected and all the titles are logical and straightforward.

Go for sticky website navigation

You should never try to stuff all the information about your site above the fold. Scrolling is something users expect to do, especially if they’re viewing your site from a tablet or smartphone. In general, you should never have more than 7 categories in your navigation menu. But, because of that and the necessity to scroll down, your navigation can get lost and the user can simply find it tedious to scroll up. This is where sticky navigation can help. This simply involves the navigation menu that “sticks” (follows) the users as they scroll wherever they want on your pages.

Be very careful when designing mobile-first navigation

Going with a mobile-first design (phone-tablet-desktop) is a great way to improve your site visually as well as boost the responsiveness of your site. Essentially, the navigation is hidden and there’s one button that shows the menu only when clicked on. However, even though this looks very sleek and clean, some visitors don’t actually check whether there’s a navigation button at all. This is especially true for desktop users. You want to do a thorough analysis of what the majority of your target audience uses to access your website. That way, you can make a proper decision on mobile-first design.

Responsive business website design is a must

What does Google want?

There are 3 main factors that show just how important mobile optimization is for your overall website success and SEO:

• Users are browsing sites via mobile more than a computer.
• People are 5 times more likely to leave websites that are not responsive.
• More than half of mobile users will leave a website that takes more than 3 seconds to load.

So if your site is not user- and mobile-friendly, you will see a drop in visitors.

Focus on the mobile version

You will need to consider your content in your mobile version, giving importance to other factors such as speed, user experience, and search engines. Try to make your content dynamic, with an adaptable layout and separate URLs.

Mobile optimization

Google has a series of mobile usability tools that detail possible problems that may arise with your web pages. Thanks to them, you can find several alerts that will give you clues as to whether you are doing well:

• Using Flash. Bear in mind that most mobile browsers’ performance drops with Flash.
• The display is not set.
• Leave a fixed width in the viewfinder. This detail is not usually given much attention but is one of the most important aspects of responsive design.
• Content not dimensioned for a graphic window.
• Leaving a small text size: this makes it difficult for users to read.
• Placing items very close to one another. This will involve clicking unwanted links.
• The emerging screens occupy the totality of the space.

Page speed

The importance of the site’s speed is especially evident when users want to find the necessary info as quickly as possible. That being said, you should evaluate the speed of your site pretty often. Make use of Google Analytics in this case. After all, quick-loading pages are the main characteristic of a responsive business website design that will boost your traffic.

Responsive website design UX

In addition to design and speed, you should consider proper website optimization as well. It’s essential to take into account the behavior of the users. What they want to do and the info they want to get with their phones. The fact is that users expect to achieve their goal in record time and with minimal effort. So you have to take into account the following improvements to get a totally responsive business website design:

Homepage:

• Try to keep the call-to-action obvious and visible.
• Make your menus intuitive and simple.
• Provide a quick and easy return to the main menu.
• Do not let the banners and promos occupy the entire browsing process.

Search:

• Make it visible.
• Make sure there are relevant search results.
• Apply filters.
• Guide users to get better search results.

Conversions:

• Let users explore before performing conversions.
• Offer valuable information.
• Use button tracking for complex operations.
• Have the conversion completed in a simple way.

Access to the form:

• Streamline access to the form.
• Choose the simplest method.
• Minimizes errors.
• Efficient and functional design.

Form and usability:

• Optimize your website for the mobile version.
• Prevent users from having to touch the screen continuously to zoom in.
• Make the images expandable.
• Keep users in a single browser window.
• If you ask for the users’ location, specify why you want it.

Steps to a clean business website design

Go for a soft color palette

The first thing to take care of in order to achieve a clean business website design is to say no to bright and neon colors. Of course, a pop of color here and there can be effective when you want to bring attention to something — like your CTA for example. Still, try to stick with neutral, soft and muted colors for your overall website color scheme if you want it to be pleasant on the eyes as well as aesthetically pleasing.

Clean website design has no clutter

Clutter in your personal environment can affect you in various negative ways. In general, people don’t react well to mess. The same is true for a website design. Keep the essential website features easily accessible but remove anything from your site’s pages that’s unnecessary and has no real or practical purpose. This is where whitespace comes into play. Not only will the proper use of whitespace make your site more attractive and cleaner, but it will also boost your SEO.

High-quality background images

Instead of filling your background and website pages with several images, opt for just one large landscape, HD image that represents your business perfectly. Of course, you can recompress the image to reduce the file size without losing on the quality. Utilizing this type of image as a site’s background (or homepage background) with faded effect is a great way to combine clean website design with a visual description of what you do.

Sans serif fonts are all the rage nowadays

There are still plenty of niches and industries that can benefit from using serif fonts as an effective contrast to the otherwise minimal design. However, the key to your clean and minimal website design is to go sans serif with the choice of your fonts. After all, sans serif fonts look neat and noise-free, and they also appear a lot more professional.

Parallax scrolling can create an interesting effect

As you try to reduce the noise and tidy up your business website, you can end up with quite a boring and uninspiring look in the end. In order to avoid this, modern websites all make the most out of parallax scrolling. Essentially, this means that your background is going to move slower compared to the movement speed of your foreground. This little trick can make a huge difference between a dull-looking and 3D-like website.

Your web design affects user experience in the following ways:

The way it looks

Of course, you can’t ignore the obvious. After all, the way your website is designed will determine its appearance. You don’t have to go for the extreme modern look if you don’t want to. However, it’s essential that your site doesn’t look old and outdated. That being said, make sure that your website has a responsive design, big and bold fonts, high-quality images and multimedia as well as parallax scrolling, as mentioned before.

Your level of professionalism

One way your business web design affects user experience deals with your company’s professionalism. Essentially, you want people to perceive your company as a reputable one. If you’re wondering what web design has to do with this aspect of your business pay attention to how you feel when browsing other sites. Your target audience has to be able to find info about your business and your employees as well as valuable testimonials in order to trust you.

Ease of navigation

Another very important aspect of web design that has everything to do with user experience is the simplicity of your navigation. Your site visitors need to be able to find whatever they’re looking for quickly and easily. Therefore, you may want to stay clear from complex and extravagant navigation solutions. Not everyone is tech savvy and the majority of people appreciate clean and easy to understand navigation menu.

Your site’s load time

Again, your web design affects user experience in regards to the speed of your site’s load time. Obviously, the faster the load time, the better it is. Therefore, you shouldn’t have huge size images on your site or multimedia that plays automatically. Moreover, effectively used white space can help speed up the load time as well. Definitely test your site’s load time since the majority of people these days admit that they would leave a website if it took more than just a couple of seconds to load.

The success of conversion

You may have different calls-to-action and conversion goals every now and then. However, it’s still important that you use your web design in order to boost the conversion rate. Namely, it’s essential that you choose the best colors for your landing page in order to grab people’s attention without the overwhelming effect. Also, the landing page should be as simple and straight-to-the-point as possible. Finally, add some soul to your company by using effective images to go along with your CTAs.

3 most common business website mistakes:

1. Bad quality images

One of the biggest business website mistakes that you can make is to present your work/products/services with bad quality images. No matter how great your blog posts and case studies are, or how modern your design is, if the images that feature your offers are poor, you’re doomed. Blurry, bad quality and pixelated images create an impression of a tardy and not at all professional business. If you have some poor images on your business website, you may be losing leads without even knowing it. If you can’t take good quality photos yourself, make sure to hire a professional who can. This investment will pay off considerably in the long run.

2. You don’t have an SEO strategy

TechBear has already explained just how important it is to have a proper SEO strategy. So, if you don’t have one, there’s basically no point in having a website either. Think about it — the whole purpose of your business website is for your prospective clients to find you online. If you don’t have an SEO strategy, you won’t show up high enough in the search results or at all. There are many factors that determine just how functional and effective your SEO strategy is. One of the key elements is a proper use of keywords. However, content and user-friendly web design are also essential factors. Therefore, it would be best to hire an SEO specialist or a company like TechBear that deals with all website-related matters and online presence in general.

3. Ineffective call-to-action strategy

If you want to generate more leads, you can’t put everything into just one call-to-action. Of course, there’s no point in stuffing your web pages with CTAs. You’ll only appear too pushy and salesy. In order to get the most out of lead generation, you need to use a wide range of marketing techniques that all have a strong CTA goal. This means that you can’t expect people to click on the button just because you tell them to do so. You need to get the wording right for your CTAs on your website, but also work on other engaging tactics such as email newsletters, blog content, social media activity, etc.