With over 20 years designing user friendly websites throughout Northamptonshire and the neighbouring counties, we thought we would share with you our web design tips with a particular focus on websites for smaller businesses.
Take a look below at our top ten web design tips for small businesses in 2025.
This is our first tip when designing and building your new website for your business.
Keep it simple...remember to make the journey and the process for your customers as easy as possible. You will want to ensure that they can get to where you want them to go as easily as possible. This means the tone, language, visuals etc all need to aid the journey through your website.
It is 2025 after all! Make sure your new website has been designed with mobile users at the forefront.
It is most likely that the majority of your visitors will be coming to your website via some kind of mobile device.
Think about how best to engage with them utilising a mobile first design.
We believe this is often over looked. The hosting of your website is as important as the website itself.
You might have designed and built the fanciest looking website in the world but if your hosting is poor and as a result it takes an age to load or an age to move around the website, you will most likely disengage with your visitors.
Make sure you invest in a hosting solution that is suited to your website and ensures that the user experience is fast and secure.
You will want your website to standout from the crowd. With that in mind your branding needs to be strong, relevant and engaging. What you may have designed off-site may need some work on-site. The web world is not the same as the print world.
Make sure your website branding is clear, strong and concise on-line to stand out from your competition.
Okay we know. We told you that the web world was different to the print world and with that in mind you needed to ensure that your branding on-line was strong and web relevant. That does not mean that it should not be consistent with your off-site branding nor should it be inconsistent on-line.
Make sure that your fonts are consistent, your styling is consistent and your tone of voice is also consistent.
Keep the brand message on your website strong and consistent.
You have heard it before, we are sure, content is King. Your new website needs good quality, well written, relevant and unique content. This will help to ensure that your website engages with the search engines and ensure that your visitors know what you do, who you are and why they should buy your product or service.
Content is King!
So you've built your website, it looks great, the message is strong, the branding is consistent, the content is amazing but no one has come to see it. That's probably because the search engines are not ranking you high enough. If you have not completed all the basic on-site SEO elements, then that is likely to be a big part of the issue.
Make sure your headings are all in place, good internal linking throughout and of course make sure you have completed all the meta elements.
Throughout your website you should be making use of CTAs to help direct your visitors through to relevant pages such as product pages, service pages and contact pages.
A CTA on your website should stand out, be easy to see and use and aid the user experience (UX).
Keep your CTAs relevant and ensure that they are taking the visitor to the right page, every time!
Your new website should never stand still and you should never assume that it is all good and it will therefore always be good.
Take time to test that all the links work, all the pages work, the content is still relevant, the images work and are still relevant, your headings are correct, the meta elements are in place, etc.
Whatever needs amending, amend it. Then put some time in to REPEAT the whole exercise.
This could and maybe should have been tip one but we wanted this to stand out and as such it is our final tip.
Make sure when beginning the process for getting your next website designed and built you have given thought to the CMS.
All nine tips that have gone before will work best and be easier to manage/implement if you have chosen the right CMS to work with.
Be careful of FREE web builders, be aware of plug in's and be extra savvy to security patches and updates.
Choose the right CMS!
Not sure where to turn? Do you need some help getting your new website off the ground?
Get in touch with us today we would be delighted help.