Mastering the art of building a successful B2B website is a challenge in itself. Bringing together an intuitive UI that takes your audience on the journey that you want them to take while ensuring that the branding is perfect, can be tricky to balance and get right. In this article, we explore the principles for creating a well-designed B2B website.
What is a B2B website?
B2B stands for Business-to-business and refers to sharing goods, services, communication or data between companies rather than between companies and consumers (B2C).
A B2B website is designed to target your business buyers. It is an important part of your marketing strategy as it allows you to reach out to potential customers and influence their buying decisions.
Your website should be optimised for search engines and provide useful information about your business, its products and services in a clear and concise way.
Why do you need a well-designed website for your business?
A website is the online or virtual image of a business on the internet. Hence, the same emphasis on presentation and branding needs to be implemented on a business website. To get the branding and user journey right, usually a digital marketing or digital solution agency that specialises in B2b websites is consulted.
Generally, a well designed B2b site can aid in a company’s marketing and branding efforts. It can also be used to map a user’s journey and this data can be used to optimise the site and boost online and offline sales. A poorly designed site can also make your business look unprofessional and unorganised, losing trust from your customers.
Second, if you have a well-designed website, it will help you gain more traffic and leading to more sales. If someone visits your site and finds that it looks professional and user-friendly, they are more likely to return to conduct business with you in the future.
A well-designed website is important because it will allow you to stand out from your competition. If your competitors do not have websites, this leaves room for you to advertise yourself as being ahead of them in terms of technology and innovation.
5 Principles For A Well-Designed B2B Website
The design of your B2B website is one of the most critical factors affecting your ability to convert visitors into leads. Whether it’s a landing page or a blog, if you want to ensure that users see your content, then you need to ensure that it is optimised for engagement. If you are using a digital solutions agency you need to ensure that they apply the following five key principles:
Design a simple user journey
Analyse your customers’ user journey to find out the easiest path that leads them to high value information, product or services. By making this journey easier, users will likely to interact with the site efficiently that will earn their trust. This will generally result in a higher lead generation through your website. Ensuring a simple and engaging sitemap is an important step towards creating the final site.
Consider user behaviour
What sequence do you anticipate your website visitors will view your pages in? It makes sense that they would first look at a product page. However, consider where they will discover it and the subsequent pages they will visit. Although it may seem obvious, make sure the sites you believe visitors will want to browse are prominently displayed and simple to discover.
Be logical
It’s great that you have organised your website to make things simple to discover. However, the organisation of the content on your website pages must be logical and flow properly.
Create an accessible website
Regardless of capabilities, platform, or context, anyone may easily navigate your site if it is “as approachable as feasible.”
In the end, literally “checking off” this crucial component of web design improves everybody’s experience, draws more users, and enables them to focus on the most crucial aspects of the site.
To avoid poor design process, here is a checklist that we created:
- Check the font size to ensure all the content is the right size and fits the branding
- Keep typography simple and be cautious about overusing fashionable fonts that could affect readability
- Ensure that colours are not clashing and consistent with company branding
- Content with low or backdrop contrast makes text difficult to read
- To improve readability ensure line length complements font size and typography
- Responsive web design is integrated rather than slapped on
Most users use their phone for browsing and ensuring that a company’s website is optimised for a mobile phone is of utmost importance. A study revealed that 75% of people evaluate a website’s legitimacy solely based on aesthetics. Therefore, it is crucial that your website can easily expand to accommodate multiple devices without affecting the integrity of your design.
Create clickable design interactions
Nobody will click if a button appears to be just regular text. The navigation bar, call-to-actions, page links, and anything that can be clicked should graphically react to the user’s actions. Typically, hover-states are used to doing this.
It is important to remember that the hover state is ineffective for mobile web design. Naturally, there is never a cursor visible on the screen. Clicking is done by visitors using their fingers, keypad buttons, or even a phone stylus.
Create a visual hierarchy
In web design, the term “visual hierarchy” refers to express design features and decisions that enable a website to be easier to grasp.
Studies have shown that visualisation is even quicker than thinking regarding how humans organise data into concrete shapes. By subconsciously conveying to users what is most essential or of lesser value, a scheme for web design can enhance accessibility.
Final Words
We have outlined the most important principles for a well-designed B2B website. A good way to better understand the difference between B2C and B2B websites is to examine how these two types of websites differ.
At Evolve, we create high quality, user centric, responsive b2b websites that takes into considering all the design principles mentioned above. We are based in Surrey, Oxfordshire and Marlow, and can help you with all your marketing needs