Top 276 Small Business Website Design Examples

Stock photography did the most damage here

Accounting is the category stock libraries hurt worst. The handshake, the calculator, the skyline through vertical blinds, repeated across thousands of near identical sites, all saying the same nothing. The firms in the accounting gallery went the other way and committed to an identity. Harness runs navy serif on warm sand and puts an exploded isometric diagram where the team photograph would go. Pilot fills the screen with deep violet and a faint engineering grid. Hiline centres two lines of green serif on cream and lets the second one fall into italic.

None of that is decoration. A firm that looks like the clients it wants wins those clients, and the firm that looks like every other firm competes on price.

Shops that photograph their own building

Repair is the mirror image. Four or five lead generation vendors supply most of the trade, and the shops that escaped did it with a camera. Grace Automotive sets enormous condensed capitals over a night shot of its real storefront and splits the promise white and red. King of Hybrid runs a dim video of the actual workshop with one bright green button cutting through it. Electrified Garage floats a cutaway Tesla on a drafting grid with numbered callouts naming the systems it repairs, which tells you more about the shop's competence than any paragraph could.

The best professional sites photograph nobody

The law firm gallery is the sharpest lesson in restraint on the site, because the category default is a lawyer in front of a bookcase and almost none of the good ones do it. Munger Tolles draws a red wire frame loop on warm off-white and writes two black sentences, each closed by a red full stop. Cravath floats a navy serif deal headline over giant pale blue words from the same sentence, blown up and bled off both edges. Keker puts a yellow three line headline on a dark green panel beside a photograph of its own lobby.

The same holds in accounting, where the firms with an identity beat the firms with a team photo, and in real estate, where the photograph simply is the page: a headline, one button, and nothing else until you scroll. If you sell expertise, the thing to design is the argument, not the people making it.

Photographers are the control group

Thirteen of the fourteen sites in the photography gallery lead with an image above the fold, and nine introduce no colour of their own anywhere in the interface. That is the purest version of a rule every business on this page is working with: if your pictures are good, get out of their way, and if they are not, the design cannot rescue them.

The two that break it are worth the look. Kristin Teig fills the screen with her own name in a huge italic serif and shows no photograph at all. Kelsey McClellan runs a tomato red nav band with a looping script signature over cream. Both work because the restraint elsewhere is total.

Leave things out

The dealer gallery is the purest lesson in restraint on the site, because almost every entry places the same bet: a full-bleed photograph or autoplaying video, type set straight over it with no scrim, one or two square-cornered buttons. What separates the good from the merely competent is how much they leave out. Osprey puts a black Defender in tall grass, stacks a serif headline at the left and runs GPS coordinates along the bottom edge. Enthusiast Auto shoots a blue E46 M3 dark and close and spends its entire colour budget on a pill button ringed in red and blue.

That is a dealer problem only in the sense that dealers have good photographs. The question travels: how many things are you willing to ask for before the visitor scrolls?

One idea on the first screen, in food and lodging too

The restaurant gallery holds the line almost everywhere: the first screen carries one idea and nothing else, a photograph or a wordmark or a flat field of colour. GGET splits a cream page down the middle with grey caps stacked three deep against a cobalt panel. Canlis prints a pale sage wordmark the width of the screen both over and under a photograph of its own cantilevered glass roof. State Bird scatters nine quail silhouettes across cream beside a hand-brushed wordmark.

Hotels do the same with more room to spend. Kinsley floats four watercolour paintings of its own buildings on white inside a thin red border. Zero George sets a 96px italic serif over desaturated video of a shuttered white room. What neither category does, in the sites that survived, is stack a promo bar, a popup and a booking widget on top of each other before you have seen the place.

Flat colour beats a gradient over a photograph

Every strong fold in the bakery gallery is either one flat brand colour or one honest photograph, and never a stock image with a dark gradient dropped over it to make the type readable. Bub and Grandma's fills the whole screen with amber and a navy ink drawing of the storefront. Radio Bakery sets a 76px serif reading OPEN DAILY on pistachio green. Dozen runs a cream band over a black slab carrying hours, address and a daylight photograph of the building.

The ones that stumble all stumble in the same place, with script or pale type laid over a bright photograph. If the headline needs a scrim to be legible, the photograph is wrong or the headline is.

What to take into a brief

• Pick the client you want and design for that one, not for everybody with a wallet.
• Photograph your own premises, your own people, your own work. Badly shot real beats beautifully shot generic.
• One typeface doing the display work, one doing the reading, and a reason for each.
• One action on the first screen. Decide what it is before anything else gets designed.
• Say the price, the turnaround or the speciality out loud if it is the thing that wins work.

Accounting if you sell expertise and need an identity, repair and dealers if you have premises and a camera, bakeries for colour.