What makes a good website is simple to say and harder to do: a visitor understands what you offer within seconds, finds what they need without thinking, trusts you enough to get in touch, and can do all of it on a phone. These ten web design tips cover each of those.
The tips are grouped by what they fix: clarity, speed and mobile, trust, content and accessibility, and search. After them there is a note on which trends are worth following, and a quick way to check your own site.
What Makes a Good Website?
Your website is the centre of your online presence, and a good one does a job for the business. For most small businesses that job is turning a stranger into an enquiry, and every part of the site either helps with that or gets in the way.
In practice, a good website is clear about what you do, fast on any device, easy to find your way around, believable, and easy to act on. It doesn't need to be clever or packed with features. Our guide to why web design is important covers what a poor site costs you. The tips below cover what good looks like.
Tips for a Clear Website
1. Say What You Do in the First Five Seconds
The top of your home page should answer three questions before anyone scrolls: what you do, where you do it, and who it's for. "Emergency plumber in Mansfield" beats "Welcome to our website" every time a visitor has a burst pipe. Save the company story for the About page.
2. Put the Call to Action Where Decisions Happen
A call to action is the next step you want a visitor to take, such as "Call now" or "Get a quote". Put it where the visitor has just been given a reason to act: after the service description, next to the prices, beside the reviews. Make it a button in the user interface, not a link buried in a paragraph, and keep to one clear call to action per page rather than five competing ones.
3. Keep the Navigation Predictable
Intuitive navigation is the part of the user experience people only notice when it's missing. Use the words your customers use, keep the menu to a handful of items, and put Contact where people expect it, usually at the end of the menu. Plan the user journey so each page leads naturally to the next, and no page is a dead end.
Tips for Speed and Mobile
4. Design for the Phone First
Many of your visitors will arrive on a phone, often in a hurry. Responsive design means the layout rearranges itself for a small screen, but a user-friendly website goes further on mobile: buttons big enough to tap, text readable without zooming, and your phone number one tap away.
5. Keep Pages Fast
Fast load times keep visitors on the page long enough to read it. Page speed optimisation starts with images: compress them before you upload them. Then avoid autoplaying video, and be wary of anything that loads from a third party on every page. Google's free PageSpeed Insights tool shows how your pages perform and what is slowing them down.
Tips for Building Trust
6. Use Real Photos, Not Stock
Visitors recognise stock photography, and it tells them nothing about you. Photos of your work, your team, your van or your premises do more for trust than any polished image of people you've never met. They don't need to be professional, just clear, well lit and honest.
7. Show Proof Where People Look
People look for proof before they get in touch. Put reviews near the call to action rather than on a page nobody visits, link them to the review platforms they came from, and show any accreditations or trade memberships with a link to the public register. A short case study of a real job is often more convincing than a paragraph about how much you care.
Tips for Content and Accessibility
8. Write for Your Customers, Not About Yourself
Meaningful content answers the questions customers ask before they buy: what the service includes, how long it takes, what it costs or what the price depends on, and what happens next. Count how often your pages say "we" and how often they say "you". The best pages lean towards the customer.
9. Make It Easy for Everyone to Use
Accessible design helps every visitor, not only those with a disability. Use strong contrast between text and background, a readable text size, descriptive link text, and alt text on images. The W3C's Web Content Accessibility Guidelines set out the standard in full, and most of it is common sense.
Tips for Being Found
10. Build It to Be Search Engine Optimised
A website nobody finds can't do its job. Give each main service its own page, with a page title and heading that match what customers search for. Keep the site fast, and link your pages to each other where it helps the reader. If you serve a local area, our local SEO checklist covers the basics, and our guide to why a website ranks poorly explains the usual problems.
Which Web Design Trends Are Worth Following?
Website trends come and go, and most small businesses can ignore them. The test for any trend is whether it helps your customers do what they came to do.
Heavy animation, video backgrounds and interactive elements can look impressive in a showcase, but they often slow pages down and get in the way on a phone. Trends that make a site clearer, such as bigger text, simpler layouts and plain-English headings, are worth adopting whenever they arrive. Modern website design at its best is about removing things, not adding them.
Is Your Website Good Enough?
Try this: open your site on your phone and give yourself five seconds on the home page. Could a stranger say what you do, where, and how to get in touch? Then ask a friend to find your prices and send you an enquiry, and watch where they hesitate.
If the answers are uncomfortable, our guide to why web design matters includes a list of signs it's time to upgrade, and our website redesign service explains how we rebuild sites. Starting from scratch? Our guide to planning a website walks through it step by step, and our web design service page shows how we work.
Good Website FAQs
Book a free consultation if you'd like us to look at your website with you.
What makes a good small business website?
A clear statement of what you do and where, fast pages that work on a phone, easy navigation, real photos and reviews, and an obvious way to get in touch. Most small business websites need 4-6 well-planned pages, not dozens.
How do I know if my website is good?
Watch someone who doesn't know your business try to use it on their phone. If they can say what you do, find your prices and send an enquiry without help, it's doing its job. Tools like PageSpeed Insights and your analytics fill in the rest.
How often should a website be redesigned?
When it stops doing its job, rather than on a fixed schedule. Signs include a site that is hard to use on a phone, hard to update, or no longer reflects what you offer. If you do redesign, plan the redirects so you keep your search rankings, which our guide to redesigning without losing rankings covers.
Callum Robley
Founder & Lead Developer, Tea Powered Projects
Callum is a full-stack developer and the founder of Tea Powered Projects, a web design, development, and hosting company based in Nottingham, UK. With over 15 years of industry experience, he specialises in building reliable, scalable digital solutions for businesses of all sizes.
