There is a stage in building a website where an hour disappears. Two designs are open in two tabs, they differ by a typeface and the position of a button, and the decision feels enormous because it is the first visible one.
It is not enormous. It is one of the most reversible decisions on the whole project, and the hour would be better spent on the paragraph nobody has written yet.
What a design actually decides
A design is a set of structural choices, and there are only a few that matter:
- What is in the first screenful. A photograph the width of the screen, or a headline and a button? This is the biggest difference between one design and another, and it is a genuine decision.
- What the first action is. Book, buy, call, browse, enquire. A design built around a booking button and one built around a product grid are not interchangeable.
- How much room there is for words. Some designs want a sentence. Some want three paragraphs. Pick the one that matches what you actually have to say.
- What repeats. A list of services, a grid of products, a set of listings. The right design has a natural home for the thing you have a lot of.
That is roughly it. Everything else people agonise over is a setting.
What it does not decide
Colours, fonts, photographs, every word, the order of the sections and which sections exist at all. All of those change afterwards in minutes. If you are choosing between two designs on the basis of a shade of blue, you are choosing between two identical things.
This is the source of the paralysis: designs are presented as finished pages, so they look like commitments. They are starting arrangements.
Three questions that get you there in five minutes
- What is the one thing you want a visitor to do? Choose the design that puts that action in front of them without scrolling. If it does not have an obvious home for your main action, no amount of colour work will fix it.
- What do you have a lot of? Twenty products, six services, forty properties, one menu. Pick the design that already shows that well, because filling the wrong shape is the actual work you are trying to avoid.
- What have you got to show? Be honest about photographs. A design built around full-width imagery is a punishment if you have three phone snaps, and a text-led design will serve you far better until you have shot the seven photos your website needs.
Answer those and usually two or three designs remain. At that point any of them is fine, and the difference between them is smaller than the difference made by one better sentence on the home page.
When to stop choosing
Stop at fifteen minutes. Genuinely.
The reason is not that taste does not matter. It is that you cannot evaluate a design against an empty page. Every one looks good with a model's photograph and lorem ipsum, and they only start to differ once your words and your pictures are in them. The fastest route to a good decision is to pick the closest one, put your real content in it, and look again with something real to look at.
If it is wrong then, you will know immediately and for a concrete reason, which is a far better position than the one you are in now.
The point that makes this safe
Changing your mind is cheap. On a hosted builder, the design and the content are separate things, so switching designs does not mean rewriting your site. Your pages, photographs, products and bookings stay where they are.
Which turns the whole decision from a commitment into an experiment. Browse the designs, pick the one that answers the three questions, and get your own words into it today. Our free website builder will publish a real site from any of them without an account, so you can look at the version with your business in it before you decide anything at all.
The version of this that goes wrong
The failure mode is not choosing badly. It is choosing a design because it looks like the website of a business three times your size, then spending six months failing to produce the photography and the copy that design needs to work.
Pick for what you have now. A simple design filled properly beats an ambitious one half empty, every time, and it is the same difference as a small shop that is well kept next to a large one that is half stocked.
Frequently asked questions
How do I choose a website design for my business?
Answer three questions. What is the one thing you want a visitor to do, so the design must have an obvious home for it. What do you have a lot of, so the design already shows it well. And what have you got to show, because an image-led design punishes you if you have three phone snaps.
Does the design matter more than the content?
No. A design decides structure: what is in the first screenful, what the first action is, how much room there is for words and what repeats. Colours, fonts, photographs, wording and the order of sections all change afterwards in minutes.
Can I change my website design later?
On a hosted builder, yes, and cheaply. The design and the content are separate things, so switching does not mean rewriting the site. Your pages, photographs, products and bookings stay where they are, which is what makes the first choice safe to make quickly.