B2B Marketing Insights | Open Path Digital

Searching for a B2B Web Design Agency that Drives Results?

Written by Nancy Kirchoff | September 7, 2022

Have you ever visited a cluttered website with contrasting colors or a layout that made it hard to navigate? Your initial response was likely to move on to the next website listed in the search results. Effective B2B website development can be the difference between a new customer and a lost prospect.

 

B2B Web Design Best Practices

 

That’s why it’s crucial to find the right B2B web design agency with industry expertise, technical and aesthetic skills to develop an effective website that captures your brand with a clear message. Your website is how visitors learn what your brand is all about. The best website designs meet users’ needs using a straightforward, simplistic, and efficient approach.

 

 

Why Is Navigation Important in Web Design?


A great B2B web design agency understands the importance of website optimization at every step of the buyer's journey. Wherever your customer is in the process, the best website design will allow visitors to find content easily by making navigation simple, organic, and straightforward.

Navigation toolbars and sidebar callouts make it easy for your visitors to find exactly what they’re looking for. CTAs (or Call-to-Actions) ensure they understand what you want them to do, whether they become a lead or a customer. Through clear CTAs, you help guide prospects from one stage of the buyer’s journey to the next.

What is Visual Hierarchy in Web Design?


Visual hierarchy determines the order users process information on a page. Create an area of focus where you want to attract attention. It should be the most significant part of your page and emphasize one central focal point. A clear sense of visual hierarchy guides people toward content and actions of importance since they’ll have a focal point to grab their attention.


How to Design Web Pages for Simplicity


A key element in B2B website development is to design a simple layout. Too much text or graphic content will clutter your pages and cause visitors to get lost and immediately move on. Don’t feel as if you have to fill every bit of your web page — white space can enhance the readability of the text on the page and give it a simplified, clean look.

As you read through the key design elements below, compare the two sample website pages that show the difference between a good and a bad design. Which do you find most visually appealing?

 
  • Symmetry: Balanced designs look clean and organic and provide good symmetry. Creating balance in website designs organizes the visual elements on a page.
  • Color: Color is a key website design element for maintaining your brand. Preferably, you already understand the general color scheme you want to be connected to your brand as you begin the design process. Try to limit your use of color so that various accents don’t create an unpleasant reader experience.
  • Graphics: Keep it simple but don’t forget the basics. A successful image personally connects with your audience and will easily be recognized. In general, people connect with people. Images that contain happy, pleasant faces will grab more attention than unemotional images. Keep your images at a minimum as too many can overwhelm your visitors.
  • Copy: Content should be broken down into logical blocks so that users can distinguish sections from each other. Using content headers allows users to skip to the parts they don’t want to read. They also break up large amounts of texts into more reader-friendly sections.

B2B Website Development


Simplicity also plays a significant role in improving your site's performance. The best web designs will solve various technical issues during the planning process. Embracing simplicity in your web design will help you ensure that your visitors have a user-friendly experience by following design best practices:

  • Browser Friendly: A simplistic approach can help your web pages appear the way they should across various browsers, such as Firefox, Internet Explorer, Chrome, Edge, Safari, and Opera.

  • Fast Loading: Web pages shouldn’t take longer than 3 seconds to load. Cluttering your website with too many images, videos, and gifs will result in slow loading speeds, which will detract users. Since page speed is a ranking factor, slow speeds can also hurt your search ranking.

  • Resolution Suitability: If you design your website for higher resolutions, some low-resolution screens and older devices may not be able to display all of your content. It’s impossible to ensure your design is suitable for all resolutions, but a simpler design will help maintain consistency.

  • Mobile Compatibility: People are increasingly using mobile phones and tablets to access the internet, so optimizing your website for mobile is a necessity. A clean design is more likely to be compatible with mobile devices.

As you can see, simple, clean web designs have so many benefits. Minimizing the clutter will help your customers have a better user experience and help you turn your customers into great sales leads. As seen in our examples, the clear structure, simplified navigation, and clean design in the first example is much more appealing, while the latter is confusing, cluttered and downright annoying.

 

Open Path: Your B2B Web Design Agency of Choice.


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