21 Website Design Tips For Small Business: Latest & Most Effective Guide

“Website design tips”, is that what you have just typed into the Google search bar and found us? You’ve come to the right place. As you’ve known, the world and most businesses now revolve around digital life. And it’s impossible to not follow the trend. Therefore, a website is vital, in any case, no matter what you’re trying to sell online. It’s your representative, it’s your salesperson, it’s your business. We know you’ve just made up your mind about building a website. And now it’s time for learning some helpful tips and tricks to maximize the ability of your website. 

In this blog, we’ll guide you through our professional website design tips that we've been studying and practicing to ensure the best effectiveness. Keep scrolling to get all those great hacks to boost the performance of your website!

Most effective website design tips you should use: 

1. Have a clear plan

Planning is an important step in your business, and website design should have a plan as well. To begin our website design tips, then we must start with planning. Once you’ve made up your mind on what you need on your website, it’s time you go into details of everything. Starting with a sitemap, then work your way down to every smallest problem, sketching out how you’d tackle them. 

Think about your customers' journey, what do they need or want to see on your website. At what stage you should have them hooked, what will be your key conversion. Identify your key touchpoints, where you have the most attention, your goals, your targets, SWOTs, and everything involved around your business. Think carefully about all of those things, you’ll be planning a much effective web page for sales and tick all the boxes on your users’ minds. 

2. Simple & clean layout

Even if you’re considering using ready-to-go templates or custom designs, make sure you’re keeping your website design simple. We find this to be the most important website design tips since so many of you overthink it when it comes to branding. If you think you have to do something extreme, bold, and unique, then it’s true. But it doesn’t mean you make it crazily fussy and complicated to look at. Your users are too easy to distract, so you’d want to keep them focused on what you’re offering them, not a hard-to-understand graphic. Keep your branding simple and clean, that’ll be much better for your web performance. 

3. Prior speed 

Site speed is the top reason why a user decided to stay or leave. Therefore you’d want to stay on top of the game against your rivals on this. Make a research on what pages of your site are running slow, what issues are happening, and how you could fix them. You should also check on how your competitors are doing as well. If you’ve already done all you could but the loading speed is still undesirable, think about changing your hosting plan. 

4. Optimize for mobile search

No matter what you’re selling, what type of content you’re publishing, we insist you make sure that your site is compatible with mobile devices. Currently, the number of users using mobile devices like phones or tablets is a massive part of the pie. And business should never sleep on that fact. Thus, a site that’s not optimized for multiple devices will lead your customers directly to your rivals, hurt your SEO, and worse. Take this website design tips and work on it now if your web page hasn’t been optimized yet.

5. Content layout 

This is a vital part of branding, and we feel the urge to keep reminding you about it. Whether you’re new on how to learn website design or a business owner, you must keep all your pages, social media, site, and all media forms in a consistent layout, theme & design. Creating unity is important in your website design and all of your media. This helps to carve the images, personality, and products of you deep in users’ minds. Thus you won’t create any confusion to your customers while allowing them to be familiar with your existence. 

6. A memorable domain 

Make it easy for your customers when they want to get access to your webpage. Don’t throw a bunch of nonsense, complicated characters on your domain and call it a day. Make it simple, easy to remember, and professional. Just by a small action, not only you’ll get more traffic, but it’s also better for your branding kit. 

7. Create your unique content

You can use others' content as inspiration, never copy the exact same thing, and post on your website. Once you do it, you’ll fall into a long journey to recover your SEO ranks. Do not copy and use others' content of any kind, try to create your own. Customers will trust and be more likely to buy from websites that have helpful, unique content, so be that site. These are the website design tips that you must keep close to your working space, and remind yourself of it whenever you’re down on creating unique content.

8. Easy to read content 

Don’t just create content, create easy-to-read ones. Don’t just use words, make videos, capture photos, GIFs, infographics, and so on. Users are easily distracted by so many things on the net, so you’d want to soothe them a bit more with easy-to-watch, read and interact content. The simpler, the better. 

9. Valuable images

Pictures, real photos carry an impressive power to boost people’s imagination. A good, clear, and happy photo is always useful when it comes to website design tips. Real-life photos that you’ve put souls into are the key to conversion. This is because customers love seeing a more human, more personal brand that seems like a friend to them. Use your images to gain users’ trust, from products to services, it’s all possible. 

10. Avoid stock photos

This website design tips won’t be your favorite, but we must tell you the truth. Stock photos are always available and ready to use without the fuss of setting a real photoshoot. However, the largest problem with these stocks is everyone, including your competitors could have access to it. So there is no originality, no real emotions, and they’re not gonna create trust. Be authentic, be real to your customers even if it's just through photos. 

11. Add visual guide

When it comes to cues, do you know that you could control where your users’ looking at? Yup, adding the right arrow or a face could help a lot. You can use these elements to guide users’ attention to one specific point of a statement or call to action. And although it seems ridiculous, we are really serious about its effectiveness. Go and try these website design tips sometimes, you’ll see.

12. Key-phrase focus

When you’re on the first pages of how to learn website design, you might have encountered this tip. Everything you put onto your site must be key-phrase focus, for SEO purposes. Add your keywords in the page meta description, URL, content title, everything. Take all you could from SEO, just don’t throw too many all over. Make sure that your keywords could blend in perfectly in your contents and pages, or else it’ll be horrible to read. 

13. Add Alt tags

Not everyone would know about this to recommend to you. But here, we’ve been working in the digital industry long enough to know the power of Alt tags. Adding those tags will allow the algorithm of search engines to know what your images are all about and consider showing your images when users search. 

14. Answer all your customers question on-site

Users come to your web pages carrying a lot of questions. Your job is to answer all of those to build the trust and sympathy of your customers. The more questions you leave unanswered, the higher the chance people will leave. Finding all the key questions that your customers would ask, and answer them by contents, by graphics, answer them all. Tell them what they need, tell them about you. Just answer your users! 

15. Avoid long paragraph 

In digital content, always keep your text short, and don’t just shove a huge block of content into people’s faces. Break them down, make them smaller and easier to read. Don’t write any sentences longer than 15 words and no paragraph longer than 4-5 lines. The simpler you make it for people to read, the more they’ll stay through the whole page with you. 

16. Use simple words

When something is hard to ready, people will immediately consider it’s time-consuming or risky. So if you want that conversion, this is one of the most important website design tips, keep your words simple. Use normal, daily language that everyone can understand, or an 8th-grade level. Don’t make your customers feeling dumb by all the big words, that ain’t help. If you have to ask do they understand this, you’re doing it wrong.

17. Add evidence 

People will constantly be looking for reviews and feedback on what you’re selling. Give them evidence that choosing you is a great choice and worth every penny. Give them proof, let them connect to your social media, let them write & read reviews about your business. In return, you’ll get a great dose of conversion and interested customers. 

18. Loss and gains

The human brain tends to overvalue losses, making one loss feel even much worse than it actually is. However, it’s completely opposite when it comes to gains. Knowing this point, you could use it in website design and content to press more on their pain. Let them know what they’re missing out on, the cost of not using your product. Add up losses, break down the gains, create urgency with offers and products. Let them know they won’t have the second chance ever, and they’ll be more likely to take action. 

19. Let users sign up

Are you using a call to action to allow people to subscribe and hear from you? Then it must contain some extra info that’ll boost your conversion.

• Make it stand out from the rest of your page.
• How often they’ll get emails from you (please don’t be every day).
• How many people have subscribed and are satisfied?
• What will they get (special offers, limited products,…) 

20. Don’t do call to action everywhere

Yes, we know conversion is everything to a business. But do you need to shove it everywhere to get the conversion that you want? Absolutely no! If you do so, you’ll end up hurting your own chances. And with calls to action, don’t place them on top of your page. Guide your users' interest, build that up and a nicely designed call to action will work much better. And let us tell you this secret, most conversions happen further down, not on top. 

21. Don’t put social media icon on the header

You’d want people to stay on your site, where there is much less distraction than on social media. And the key of every website is to keep users on-site as long as it could. So placing your media handles on the header acts just like a call to action telling people to leave. Instead, leaving them down in the footer. Users can find those if they’re looking for, but not you suggesting they leave. 

In website design, you’d want to make things go in the right direction that you’ve planned out to maximize the result. And visitors come to you to look for answers that solve all of their problems, so satisfy them. Help them find what they need, and that’s when your web pages could be much more than just a beautiful layout. We hope that this website design tip is useful for you as it’s always been to us!