In today’s digital age, a well-designed website is essential for any small business. It’s your online storefront, your digital brochure, and your 24/7 marketing tool.
Small businesses are incredibly diverse and this diversity reveals itself in their websites. These small business website examples will help you kick-start the design process.
Many small business owners start by publicizing their products and services through small social media campaigns or a link in their Instagram bio. But when setting up a website, they often call in extra help to make it happen.
While some clients will know exactly what they want, others may not be very familiar with web design and may need you to explain the limitations you’re working with or raise possibilities they haven’t thought of. Aim to tailor your process, as well as your site design, to each client’s needs.
You can use this list of 10 small business websites to spark inspiration or to show clients what’s possible for their site.
Why Website Design Matters for Small Businesses
A dedicated website gives small businesses an online home and serves as an important hub for marketing efforts. The benefits of a website include:
- They are communicating better with existing and potential customers. A website allows businesses to gather important information in one place it becomes a single point of contact where people can find out about the business’s location, opening hours, products or services, and contact options.
- They are increasing reach and brand awareness. Offline and social media marketing campaigns only reach people who get the flyers in the mail or use the platforms the small business advertises on. A website opens the business to anyone in the area, or even the world, searching for that product or service. A website can also build brand recognition and awareness through content designed for search engine optimization (SEO).
- Building credibility. Investing in a professional website builds credibility and fosters trust with potential customers. Sixty-two per cent of people see the lack of an online presence as a warning sign and deliberately steer clear of businesses if they can’t find information about them online.
- Increasing independence. Advertising solely on social media platforms means that these platforms are essentially in control of the types of content a business can publish and the number of people who encounter it. Having a website creates an independent platform where small businesses can engage visitors in a way that’s tailored to the business’s needs rather than the needs of another platform.
- Selling products and services directly to online consumers. A simple e-commerce site allows a business to sell and ship nationally and internationally. Services like consulting, graphic design, teaching, and digital marketing are an excellent fit for online sales.
10 small business web design examples
Small business web design is rewarding and a lot of fun. You’ll build the website and sometimes even the brand from the ground up. Here are some of the beautiful small business websites we’ve found online. We hope they’ll inspire your creativity to make a website for a small business.
1) The People vs. Coffee
The People vs. Coffee is a mobile pop-up cafe in Adelaide, Australia. Designer Shaun Lonergan’s hero image of three to-go coffee cups and baked goods on a counter shows the cafe from the perspective of a customer waiting to order, immediately making visitors feel welcome. Small animations and interactions throughout this one-page site make for a fun user experience and reinforce the cafe’s casual vibe.
To keep the cafe’s social media and contact details at visitors’ fingertips as they scroll through the site, Shaun uses a sticky sidebar showing a black-and-white icon set that matches the site’s colour scheme.
2) Surftwins Essaouira
Essaouira-based Moroccan Surftwins Mouhssin and Yassin offer surf lessons and holidays to international visitors. Designed by Marta Kawecka, their website shows how thoughtful attention to visuals can take a site to the next level. Marta highlights the beautiful location with a sun-kissed blue, gold, and white colour palette that matches Essaouira’s water, sand, and whitecaps. Marta also chooses a background pattern based on traditional Moroccan tiles to further evoke the business’s stunning locale.
3) Bones Co
Husband-and-wife design team Bones Co. have plenty of personality, and they’re not afraid to show it on their website. A play on the pair’s spooky business name runs throughout the site, including an illustration of them pretending to be ghosts and a tombstone-shaped favicon.
One of the best ways of marketing a service is by highlighting the people that make the business tick. That means about us pages are key. But Bones Co. takes theirs to the next level by talking about their clients and themselves. They say they want to learn about their clients’ stories, purpose, and beliefs, adding: “Together, we’ll find ways to create engagement and earn trust while always sticking to your truth.”
4) RISE Athlete
The RISE Athlete website a fitness site designed by Catch Digital Inc. packs a lot of information onto the landing page: a navigation bar with nine items, a background image of a personal trainer working with a client, all-caps hero text that reads “Your new home for functional fitness,” an intro to the business, and two CTA buttons. But clever use of negative space and typological choices favouring readability balances the page instead of cluttering it.
Paired CTA buttons throughout the website target visitors at different sales funnel stages: The white ones are for people with intent to purchase, while the dark ones are for those still in the discovery and evaluation stages.
5) Standard Bots
The Standard Bots website is a fantastic example of what professional photography can do for a small business page. This robotics startup’s site features stunning photos of the business’s core product, a robotic arm, against a collection of beautifully arranged black, white, and grey backgrounds. The dark orange CTAs match the thin copper-coloured bands on the robot, which means the CTAs harmonize with the images while drawing attention through their contrast with the grayscale colour scheme.
This site includes a table comparing the Standard Bots product to its closest competitors. This kind of table is an excellent idea for pricier products, especially new ones competing with more well-known alternatives.
6) Nomadic Road
The Standard Bots site explored above uses high-quality photos to sell its product, and you can do the same to market a service. In this minimalist website for overland motoring adventure business Nomadic Road, designer Guillaume Brunon combines long shots of the offroad vehicles taken from the air and close-up pictures of desert tyre changes and sand traps. This juxtaposition of majestic big-picture photos and breathtaking experiences perfectly aligns with the company’s ethos of crafting memorable narratives for their clients to share in the future.
7) South Coast Canteen
Fergus Brown’s website for the South Coast Canteen is another example of creative typographic design. Fergus combines a ridged black background texture with the Pantograph font to create a digital version of an old-fashioned menu board. This adds a fun, nostalgic element to the site that builds an emotional connection with visitors.
8) Serenity in Leadership
Small businesses that want to appear at the top of Google search results need a search engine optimization (SEO) strategy. One part of a strong SEO strategy is using keywords to show search engines what the site is about, and maintaining a regularly updated blog helps you do just that. Leadership consulting firm Serenity in Leadership’s page, designed by Jez Dant, includes a frequently updated blog informing potential clients about their offerings while improving the company’s search rankings.
9) Terlingua Real Estate
Design and marketing firm Teel Group welcomes visitors to West Texas and Terlingua Real Estate with a loading animation of a Lone Star and then a full-page background video showing an aerial view of rural West Texas. This opening evokes the vast feeling of the local landscape — which is especially effective for a real estate firm specializing in selling rural lots. The choice to leave a lot of negative space around the text and CTAs “above the fold” (visible to viewers without scrolling down the page) further reinforces the theme of wide-open spaces.
10) Chicago CryoSpa
Prism Design Studio’s website for the Chicago CryoSpa combines a sharp high-tech look with ingenious and creative design choices. The site’s custom preloader mimics plummeting temperatures, counting down to -240 degrees Fahrenheit as the site loads. The homepage showcases the experience customers are curious about with a background image of a smiling person inside the cryogenic therapy chamber. Then a video layered over the top of the background image simulates the liquid nitrogen used in the spa’s therapy services.
Key Takeaways for Your Small Business Website:
- Know Your Audience: Understand your target audience’s needs and preferences.
- Keep it Simple: Avoid clutter and focus on clear messaging.
- Mobile-Friendly Design: Ensure your website is optimized for mobile devices.
- Fast Loading Times: A slow website can drive visitors away.
- High-Quality Visuals: Use high-resolution images and videos.
- Strong Call-to-Action: Guide visitors to take the desired action.
- Regular Updates: Keep your website fresh with new content.
- SEO Optimization: Improve your website’s visibility in search engine results.
- Analytics Tracking: Monitor website traffic and user behaviour.
By following these tips and drawing inspiration from these examples, you can create a website that will help your small
Help small businesses hit the big time with a GoHelp Digital website
Small business websites capture the unique personality of their business while usually following a fairly standard structure: landing page, about us page, product or service details, and contact details. When the website is complete, the business owner can use it as a digital hub to market the small business.
GoHelp Digital can streamline the whole process and help you create a beautiful website without coding. And if you’re pressed for time or want to work with a pre-built site structure, browse our small business website templates to find designs that you can adapt to fit the project’s needs.
