The most called for website design category today is business and this is because hundreds of new companies appear every day worldwide. Each of these firms tries to impress users with a stunning website done according to the latest trends, using bold colors, a lot of content and super features that no one has.

It is all incorrect for corporate websites, because these kinds of themes are to be clean, clear, minimal, simple and just a bit creative. This is the reason why many businessmen can’t enjoy their websites fully: they launch nonfunctional and messy themes with lack of style and visual component at all. Still, the aim of any business website is in promotion, custom support, partners/investors engagement, i.e. everything that makes business flourishing.

Keeping this idea in mind, I am interested how are businessmen going to engage clients if their websites are done at a zero level? Zero website designs are those with horrible color use and obscure navigation; the websites with cluttered layout and old-fashionable design. These websites are confusing and lead to no actions.

In this post I am going to tell you how to avoid common mistakes that website owners and inexperienced designers do. And here I give you 7 very and very easy steps how to perfect your website design if you have one or start making your first corporate site. Your business project will be faultless when you implement all these actions.

1. Color Your Website in Trendy but Simple Hues

Colors are powerful when it comes to design. A proper color combination can make your website easy on eyes and simple to read. In other turn, unsuccessful mix of colors can turn your project to a bad user experience and harm your business dramatically.

Light colors are supposed to make the best website base.

You should remember one simple rule, while developing a site for your business: abstract yourself from trends, and pay more attention to simplicity. I would rather give an example: this year freesia, dazzling blue, celosia orange are in trend, so what? Will you follow blindly the trends and add all these colors to your site making a background blue and using freesia or orange for the elements and typography? Definitely no, you shouldn’t do it.

The best colors for business web design are white, gray, beige (sand), placid blue, light green. If you like to add some vivid shades to your design, you may do it, but as accents. Talking about accents, I mean typography (preferably in headlines), buttons, lines, icons or figures.By means of color hierarchy, you can make the focus on certain content items and information that needs to be strengthened. Thereby, primary and secondary content/design details should be defined and prioritized with different colors, plus everything put on the layout needs to be contrasting to the background pattern.

2. Include a Catchy Introductory Boxon Your Front Page

I think everyone has had a sad experience of browsing a website and having no idea what it is all about. The problem of many business sites is that they don’t have intro sections. These are content blocks, jQuery sliders, various geometrical shapes with text. Such details let users catch the information quickly and understand what this company can offer them right at the first second of site browsing. This welcoming section of the front page should be not obligatory large and exhaustive, a few sentences will be enough, especially if to combine text with related images.

This website is a very simple example of the into section use:

3. Make the Navigation as Easy as ABC

Website navigation is not the feature for experiments, and realizing your innovative ideas. Navigation scheme should be kept to its minimum if you want to make users enjoy the website instead of wandering around all pages in a search of needed section. There are many types of navigation, let’s remind them quickly:

• horizontal menu bar;
• vertical bar or sidebar menu;
• drop-down menu with sub-pages;
• breadcrumb navigation;
• fly-out menu;
• footer navigation.

The best one to use is of course top horizontal menu bar. It is visible immediately, when a user loads a website, and it is easy to operate with.

I have seen many websites, which have a double navigation, i.e. top and bottom menus. The idea is that a user doesn’t need to scroll up when he/she stays at the bottom of a page and vice versa. It is comfortable, so it may also work well for a business website.

I can point out one more business-like navigation scheme: a sidebar menu. It the same compact as the horizontal bar, and keeps the layout clean. In terms of use and convenience, it is pretty good.

Take a look at this website. At the first sight the navigation of this theme has a common look and is designed as a simple top horizontal bar, but hover your mouse over it – there are tons of sub-items. The navigation becomes complex and confusing. It is not professional at all.

Open this website now,I am sure you will find it easy to navigate. There are two options to use for walking through the site: horizontal and vertical menu panels.

This navigation example is simple, even though it is designed unusually. It keeps a nice balance between professionalism and creativity.

4. Balance Text Information and Multimedia

There are websites, where the dominance of media content is appropriate. If to be more specific, these are photo portfolios, wedding albums, music related web pages and movie sites. The corporate websites are everything different, so far as they serve for a different function and the target audience of these themes differs. Still, do not think that your business site should be purely text-based. Nothing prevents you from using images, probably even videos, because they will diversify the layout and pay more attention on text. Plus, remember to leave enough white-space on the canvas, it is a key element to make site readable.

5. Use Right Fonts

You might think that your website is well-done if the colors are picked successfully, the layout is accurate, the images are uploaded, but nobody has abolished the typography yet. The typography is a crucial part of a website design, because it makes the content either readable or not. If the letters are too close to one another, the words are hard to read; in its turn, when the words are placed very close, the users may go past the whole sentences because they can’t manage to read them. It is better to spend additional hours on the typography choice, rather than waste this time on embedding unnecessary widgets on your site.

Take a look at this small collection of new 2014 typefaces that you can use for your business website design:

Font: Bommer-Slab

Font: Newslab

Font: Elysio

Font: RopaSans Pro

6. Add a Contact Form but Do It Accurately

An essential component of a perfect corporate site is Contact information and particularly Feedback Form or a Contact Form. This is the way your clients (potential or regular) can write to you, leave a message in order to get a call back or an email reply. The Contact Form can simplify and quicken the collaboration between a client and an entrepreneur. It shows how you care about your clients, listen to them, think over their suggestions and solve their problems.

Here I am giving a few examples of how you shouldn’t build your Contact page and where you can get a little piece of inspiration for your project.

I would say nothing if call this Contact page bad. It is poorly designed and it is difficult to understand where to click. I have noticed none Form to fill on this page, it lacks a professional touch for sure.

Here we can see a Contact Form, but it is too big and requires much time to fill it. Some clients may find it OK, others not, but your website should be designed for all users.

The next site has a high-quality Contact Form, it is concise and have a nice design:

7. Make Sure Your Website Is Flying

Here I mean the loading speed. The target audience of business websites is serious-intended people, who are looking for a promising project to invest in, influential partners to deal with or these are potential clients looking for a certain service. In times of fierce competition, you can’t permit yourself to lose visitors and let them go to your rivals. That is why your website should be as fast as the lightning. Take care of the images: compress them to the website quality and resize them as you need. This will speed up your site a lot. One more easy way to shorten the site loading time is to compress HTML, CSS, and JavaScript. You have probably many plugins that you don’t use, make an audit of them all, and delete unnecessary. They usually require CSS and JavaScript files, which act badly on the speed. Finally, use a fast web host.

I suppose this article will help you to make a stunning website design for your business website, taking into account the major elements you should use and how to develop them in a right way. Good luck with your project!