The Top Six Principles of Website Design for Local Businesses
While a website’s content certainly matters, your web design choices can also have a big impact on site performance. If your site visitors leave after just a few seconds, you could have a web design issue, not a content issue.
Getting foot traffic to your local business is important, but your website is like your digital storefront. It plays a big role in attracting users and keeping them interested in your company. Your audience needs to understand your web design and user interface (UI). If they don’t get the information they need, there’s a good chance they’ll leave your site (and business) for good.
Whether you hire a professional web design agency or choose to design your website yourself, it’s critical to follow the principles of website design to encourage engagement.
You don’t need to go to web design school to create beautiful websites. Make sure your site hits on these six design principles to improve your site’s usability and conversion rates.
Table of Content
Use Complementary Colors
Color choice is an important website design principle that affects how users perceive your brand.
Complementary colors are opposing colors that work well together. In this case, opposites attract: these colors have sharper contrasts that make the combination seem more vibrant. In the world of web design, this means you catch users’ eyes more quickly, which is great for boosting engagement.
These are just a few classic color combinations:
- Purple and yellow
- Red and green
- Blue and orange
Color choices have a big impact on our emotions and decisions. Using opposing colors in your web design makes your site look more aesthetically pleasing, creating visual harmony and balance.
Of course, it’s still important to use colors that make sense for your company and audience. If you’re a credit union that needs to foster trust, you might avoid vibrant, energetic colors like orange and go for blue, gray, and white instead.
Pro Tips
- You can find complementary colors by checking out a color wheel and selecting hues that are opposite from each other on the wheel.
- Leverage color psychology. Complementary colors definitely add some zing to your web design, but it’s still best to choose colors that evoke the right emotions.
- Limit your palette to no more than three colors to avoid overwhelming visitors.
- Over 12 million people in the U.S. are colorblind, which makes it hard to distinguish between blue and green, purple and red, and yellow and pink.
Try not to use these colors for important text or graphics. Use WebAIM’s free color checker to test the usability of your color choices before committing to them.
Include Negative Space in Your Web Design
There’s nothing more distracting than an overcrowded webpage. It’s tempting to put a lot of images and text on your homepage or product page, but this won’t educate your site visitors. If anything, it will overwhelm them and cause them to leave your site for good.
Negative space, or white space, is an essential principle of website design. It makes your content more digestible by giving your text and graphics room to breathe, which creates a cleaner and more organized page layout. Instead of overwhelming visitors, it naturally draws their eyes to the important details.
Pro Tips
- Surround important elements, like calls to action (CTAs) or headlines, with more white space to draw attention to them.
- Group related elements together in one block so they’re clearly connected.
- Prevent visual clutter by using text breaks and generous paragraph spacing.
- Eliminate any unnecessary text, images, videos, or other elements. The focus should be on the action you want visitors to take.
Limiting distractions increases the chances of a user interacting with your page, so only share what’s necessary.
Invest in a WordPress Site and Web Development
WordPress is a popular website platform—and for good reason. Designing websites on WordPress is much easier than coding them from scratch, especially if you’re designing a DIY website. WordPress is user-friendly and works well with search engines, which is important for search engine optimization (SEO).
WordPress is a content management system (CMS), so it’s a little different from your typical website. The upside is that this setup makes it easy to adjust your site design.
If you’re doing a DIY web design on a WordPress website, use a template to speed things up. WordPress templates are often designed by professionals, cost very little, and streamline the entire design process. It’s as simple as choosing a theme, downloading it, and customizing it to your liking.
Pro Tips
- Look for a responsive, mobile-friendly theme that looks great on all devices. Your theme should also get regular updates and have good reviews.
- Always use a child theme when you customize your theme so any updates to the parent theme won’t erase your customizations.
- Don’t use themes that come with features you won’t use. They bloat your site code and can lead to performance issues later on.
- Only install well-rated, compatible plugins for your WordPress site.
Optimize for Mobile Devices
Sixty percent of internet traffic comes from mobile devices, so there’s a good chance that potential customers are perusing your site on a smartphone or tablet. The issue is that most business owners build their websites on desktop computers, so you might not realize that desktop design elements aren’t displaying correctly for mobile visitors.
When in doubt, go for a web design tailored to mobile-first experiences. A solid mobile design can always scale up for a desktop user—but it’s really hard to shrink a desktop experience onto a smaller screen.
Pro Tips
- Using a site theme (if you’re on WordPress) that uses responsive design. This means the theme automatically adjusts all design elements to fit each user’s screen size.
- Compress all of your website images and visuals to load faster for mobile users. Try to use graphics in an SVG format instead of PNG or JPEG—they can scale up and down without losing quality.
- Avoid pop-ups.
- Simplify your navigation bar. It’s hard to select options on a huge menu on a mobile device. Use a hamburger menu or a simple top menu to streamline site navigation.
- Choose sans serif fonts that are easy to read on a small screen.
- Make buttons large enough that a mobile user can tap them easily.
Fill Your Site With Engaging Content
Your site content should complement your web design choices. Many local businesses fall into the trap of focusing too much on their features or services, when in reality, your customers want to hear about the benefits of working with you.
Pro Tips
- People don’t want to read jargon even if your brand is more buttoned-up. If you have a hard time writing conversationally, use voice-to-text to help you write how you speak. You can always edit the text afterward to make it website-ready.
- Use plenty of bullets and paragraphs to break up big blocks of text. Also, it’s a good idea to trim text so you’re sharing only the most important information.
- Include testimonials, data, or case studies throughout your site. People want proof that your business is the best—this is your chance to prove it!
- Don’t overlook the power of visual elements. Images and videos should work in tandem with your website design. It’s best to work with a professional graphic designer or videographer to create high-quality content that makes a good first impression.
This is an advanced option, but you can also try A/B testing your content.
With A/B testing, you create two versions of the same page, split your audience, and deliver each version to different visitors. At the end of the test, you’ll know which changes had the biggest impact on site performance. You’ll need to use an A/B testing tool for the job, but this is a great way to see whether your headlines, body text, offers, and CTAs engage visitors.
Include Calls to Action
This is one of the most important principles of web development. Your website isn’t just an online brochure: it’s a tool for driving action. CTAs tell visitors what they should do next, whether that’s:
- Scheduling an appointment
- Signing up for your email list
- Buying a product
- Leaving a review
- Watching a video or reading a blog
- Signing up for a webinar
Every page needs some kind of CTA, but most site visitors aren’t ready to buy something the first time they visit your website. Your website design shouldn’t urge people to make a purchase right away.
Instead, integrate lower-stakes calls to action to nurture a relationship first. Subscribing to an email list, reading a blog, or joining a webinar are great places to start.
In terms of web design, CTA placement also matters. These buttons must be visually distinct and noticeable—this isn’t the time to be shy! Add CTAs to the top and bottom of each page and throughout the body text. Use eye-catching button designs and colors to draw people’s eyes to the CTA.
Pro Tips
- Position the CTA button above the fold so people can see it without scrolling.
- Size matters. Your CTA should be large enough to stand out, but not so large that it overwhelms the page.
- Add icons or arrows to make the CTA button pop. Sometimes a small visual, like a shopping cart symbol, can encourage action.
- Use negative space. Surround your CTA with plenty of white space so it stands out.
- Add a sense of urgency. Phrases like “Limited time offer” and “Only a few spots left” encourage people to take action.
Conclusion
Your website is the virtual front door of your local business. This is your chance to make the perfect first impression on potential customers, so follow these six design principles to get more leads and sales from your existing website visitors.