8 Inspiring Website Design Examples for Small Businesses

In 2014, I founded MOTE agency with Rembrant Van der Mijnsbrugge. Specializing in ecommerce, we partner with clients at every stage of their brand journey—from initial market strategy and brand identity to design, development, and marketing—always with a focus on sustainable growth. Across my 15 years of ecommerce web design experience, I’ve shaped the strategies of clients ranging from independent brands to Fortune 500 companies. I’m excited to share the web design tips and advice I’ve gathered throughout my career.

The best websites aren’t necessarily the flashiest. A good web designer will often prioritize usability, combining minimalist design with evocative imagery and clear navigation. The goal is to create a seamless, engaging user experience that gives site visitors an immediate sense of branding and intuitive guidance on how to take action. This balance 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 help you jumpstart designing your own website.

8 high-quality website design examples

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

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

1. Klur

The skin care company Klur’s website is a great example of how taking a less-is-more approach can result in a strong, evocative site experience. Their web design uses monochrome imagery and minimalist typography to create a website that feels serene. By accomplishing that vibe, Klur puts its website visitors in the same kind of serene mindset that customers look for in their skin care ritual.

Klur is intentional about creating a harmonized branded experience at every touchpoint: from the moment you land on its website, to the moment 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 experience that helps cultivate customer loyalty.

2. Jacquie Aiche

The ecommerce website for jewelry designer Jacquie Aiche has a clean 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 experience. Its campaign imagery prioritizes continuity across channels (website, social media, etc.), which fosters a unified brand experience for its audience. 

3. Justin Reed

A good ecommerce site is an immersive experience that’s authentically representative of its brand. But at the end of the day, the design should also show restraint because you ultimately need 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 find exactly what they’re looking for.

Because more than 80% of their traffic comes from mobile devices, the Justin Reed team created a mobile-first experience 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 learn one type of navigation, making the site experience familiar regardless of where they’re accessing it. With many one-of-a-kind products, the menus feature 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 build a more immersive experience. 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 season to season (e.g., “Fall into Elegance” for autumn 2024) to alter the mood—without the need for creating a completely new website each time.

5. Nikolas Type

Nikolas Type is an independent type foundry with a website full of highly interactive elements that create an engaging user experience. The site prioritizes ease of exploration. 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 help visitors explore their options before easily purchasing via a stylized purchase button. 

These interactive elements surprise 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 focused architecture and design practice with a website that encapsulates the culture of the brand. The site’s black background creates an intimate vibe for visitors, evoking the feeling you’re eavesdropping on Snøhetta’s design process imagery. 

The website’s pared-down navigation menu also represents Snøhetta’s site goals at quick glance, driving viewers to explore more about the practice’s people, process, and projects. Snøhetta’s website strikes a balance 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 clean, simple typefaces that don’t distract from the content of each piece in the digital magazine. 

The large, legible navigation menu makes it easy to find exactly what you need. That search ease is paired with a curated selection of images linking to past issues and articles that encourage you to explore their content further.

8. Poor 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 Poor 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 good website design

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

Strong underlying patterns

Humans have a knack for pattern recognition. For that reason, sites that feel intuitive are often the ones with strong 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.

Thoughtful 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 important information first and then provides secondary and tertiary information within close reach.

A deeper connection

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

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

Seamless user experience

User experience (UX) is an essential part of web design. Good user experience involves attention to details large and small. You need 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 experience with a website, they’re more likely to trust the brand behind it. By comparison, poor UX can lead to frustration and dissatisfaction, which will erode brand trust and damage a brand’s reputation. But if you can build a memorable positive UX, visitors might share their experience with others, boosting your brand’s word-of-mouth marketing. 

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