8 Inspiring Website Design Examples for tiny Businesses

In 2014, I founded MOTE agency with Rembrant Van der Mijnsbrugge. Specializing in ecommerce, we associate with clients at every stage of their brand trip—from initial trade schedule and brand identity to design, advancement, and marketing—always with a focus on sustainable growth. Across my 15 years of ecommerce web design encounter, I’ve shaped the strategies of clients ranging from independent brands to Fortune 500 companies. I’m enthusiastic to distribute the web design tips and advice I’ve gathered throughout my career.

The best websites aren’t necessarily the flashiest. A excellent web designer will often prioritize usability, combining minimalist design with evocative imagery and obvious navigation. The objective is to make a seamless, engaging user encounter that gives site visitors an immediate sense of branding and intuitive guidance on how to receive action. This equilibrium of visually appealing design with excellent functionality is a cornerstone of great web design. 

Get inspired by our list of useful website design examples that’ll assist you jumpstart designing your own website.

8 high-standard website design examples

• Klur
• Jacquie Aiche
• Justin Reed
• Caitlyn Minimalist
• Nikolas Type
• Snøhetta
• Unconditional Magazine
• impoverished Charlie’s Almanac

Before designing your own website, spend some period looking at other sites. Try to comprehend what it is you like—or don’t like—about each site. This will assist you figure out how you desire your own website to look, feel, and function. 

Here are eight website design examples to kick off your research.

1. Klur

The skin worry business Klur’s website is a great example of how taking a less-is-more way can outcome in a powerful, evocative site encounter. Their web design uses monochrome imagery and minimalist typography to make a website that feels serene. By accomplishing that vibe, Klur puts its website visitors in the same benevolent of serene mindset that customers look for in their skin worry ritual.

Klur is intentional about creating a harmonized branded encounter at every touchpoint: from the instant you land on its website, to the instant you receive and unbox its products. For example, it uses different variations of a single typeface for both its product packaging and website. That tightly coordinated branding creates a cohesive user encounter that helps cultivate customer loyalty.

2. Jacquie Aiche

The ecommerce website for jewelry designer Jacquie Aiche has a tidy and high-contrast monochromatic color palette, which makes it very legible. This is balanced against the colors and textures of lifestyle imagery, which breathes life into showcasing their jewelry.

The Jacquie Aiche homepage also demonstrates the power of brand video. For its campaign with brand ambassadors Adam Levine and Behati Prinsloo, which ran from April to September 2024, it created a hero video that transports you into the universe of the brand. But if you’re viewing the site with a slower Wi-Fi connection, there’s a fallback image so you’re not waiting for a large file to load and missing that initial positive encounter. Its campaign imagery prioritizes continuity across channels (website, social media, etc.), which fosters a unified brand encounter for its spectators. 

3. Justin Reed

A excellent ecommerce site is an immersive encounter that’s authentically representative of its brand. But at the complete of the day, the design should also display restraint because you ultimately require visitors to transact. The luxury resale site Justin Reed is a great example of those web design characteristics: It features a minimal design that allows customers to easily discover exactly what they’re looking for.

Because more than 80% of their traffic comes from mobile devices, the Justin Reed throng created a mobile-first encounter with a single navigation menu on the left side of the page (rather than creating a desktop version with the menu at the top of the page). This means Justin Reed customers only have to discover one type of navigation, making the site encounter familiar regardless of where they’re accessing it. With many one-of-a-benevolent products, the menus characteristic advanced filtering options so users can drill down by brand, size, and more.

4. Caitlyn Minimalist 

After becoming one of Etsy’s most popular sellers, the jewelry brand Caitlyn Minimalist launched a fully customized Shopify site to construct a more immersive encounter. The Caitlyn Minimalist site prioritizes visual contrast and legibility, while injecting brand personality with lifestyle photography.

Regardless of your basic visual branding design elements, you can lean into experimentation with your photography. For example, Caitlyn Minimalist shifts its site imagery from period to period (e.g., “Fall into Elegance” for autumn 2024) to alter the mood—without the require for creating a completely recent website each period.

5. Nikolas Type

Nikolas Type is an independent type foundry with a website packed of highly interactive elements that make an engaging user encounter. The site prioritizes ease of discovery. As you scroll down the homepage, the playful cursor highlights the different typefaces, altering their size and movement on hover. When you select each typeface, it opens to a page that delves into that typeface. Those pages utilize video, magnification, and in situ examples to assist visitors explore their options before easily purchasing via a stylized purchase button. 

These interactive elements shock and delight site visitors. They also strategically highlight how to interact with the interface to explore, preview, and purchase the fonts on display. Plus, they immediately establish the Nikolas Type brand identity and product offerings by spotlighting the typefaces in lieu of other visual distractions. 

6. Snøhetta

Snøhetta is an environmentally concentrated architecture and design habit with a website that encapsulates the population of the brand. The site’s black background creates an intimate vibe for visitors, evoking the feeling you’re eavesdropping on Snøhetta’s design procedure imagery. 

The website’s pared-down navigation menu also represents Snøhetta’s site goals at quick glance, driving viewers to explore more about the habit’s people, procedure, and projects. Snøhetta’s website strikes a equilibrium of inspirational and informative, with elevated digital design elements that add personality without distracting from the core messaging and usability. 

7. Unconditional Magazine

The website of women-run magazine Unconditional is a digital complement to its highly curated and artfully designed print magazine. The site evokes a sense of visual ease while engaging the viewer on an emotional level. It uses a cohesive photography aesthetic and bold hero imagery alongside tidy, straightforward typefaces that don’t distract from the content of each piece in the digital magazine. 

The large, legible navigation menu makes it straightforward to discover exactly what you require. That search ease is paired with a curated selection of images linking to history issues and articles that inspire you to explore their content further.

8. impoverished Charlie’s Almanack

The San Francisco–based book publisher Stripe Press created a fun piece of visual storytelling as a promotional tactic for a book release. This site promotes impoverished Charlie’s Almanack, a collection of “the wit and wisdom of Charles T. Munger” (former vice chairman of Warren Buffett’s conglomerate Berkshire Hathaway).

The site pairs the practical (a grid-based design) with the unexpected, like fun 3D design elements and “Berkshire mode,” which is a nod to Berkshire Hathaway’s famously lo-fi site. With muted-color backgrounds and the same typefaces throughout, the site design creates a cohesive backbone to hold up its substantial text-based content.

Characteristics of excellent website design

• powerful underlying patterns
• considerate narratives
• A deeper connection
• Seamless user encounter

The modern website design examples above all vary in aesthetic and purpose, but there are some design elements they have in ordinary that you can apply to your own website:

powerful underlying patterns

Humans have a knack for pattern recognition. For that rationale, sites that feel intuitive are often the ones with powerful underlying patterns repeated throughout the design elements.

For example, a baseline grid, which is the vertical rhythm of a site (created by margins and padding) is an integral part of brand identity. A consistent baseline grid will feel more intuitive to users, even if they wouldn’t necessarily be able to name it.

considerate narratives

A well-designed website follows a narrative: It contains all of the information the user needs, but parses it out in a way that does not overwhelm users. Each web page or section surfaces the most significant information first and then provides secondary and tertiary information within close reach.

A deeper connection

A website is an chance to invite others to connect with your brand or business on a deeper level. It’s significant that connection feels personal and emotional, rather than purely transactional.

The website design examples in this piece weave their core initiatives and values into each site, starting with the homepage. This gives visitors a sense of what a brand or business is all about, which goes hand-in-hand with building depend.

Seamless user encounter

User encounter (UX) is an essential part of web design. excellent user encounter involves attention to details large and tiny. You require to ensure that your brand’s overall narrative and brand identity are clearly conveyed and woven throughout the site. 

When site visitors have a positive encounter with a website, they’re more likely to depend the brand behind it. By comparison, impoverished UX can navigator to frustration and dissatisfaction, which will erode brand depend and damage a brand’s reputation. But if you can construct a memorable positive UX, visitors might distribute their encounter with others, boosting your brand’s word-of-mouth marketing.