In a technologically advancing world, where everyone can see everything online, it’s easy to get the things you want to show people lost in a sea of content! With up to an estimated 2.5 billion videos being uploaded across social media and online channels a day, it can feel like a battle to get your posts or website in front of your target audience. One way to market your business and give your audience everything they need is through a well-optimised website.
The first website to ever exist launched 30 years ago, and since then have been the main source for information for the majority of people. As of late 2025/early 2026, the Internet hosts 1.34 billion websites globally, so it can feel like an impossible task to be seen, let alone rank on Google or use it to make money. Today we are breaking down 10 things that every business website needs, and why these small changes can make a big difference to your sites visability.
What does website design mean?
We think it’s important to get a few things clear before we dive into SEO and loading speeds. When someone designs a website, they aren’t just making it look pretty. They are designing how that website operates, functions and how user-friendly it is for those on the other side of the screen. Being able to create a website from scratch is a skill that spins a lot of different plates at the same time, and when you’ve got a site you are happy with, it will probably only be version 1 of many!
1. User Centric Design
When we meet with clients who need a website, it’s tempting to get lost in the details or flashy animations or funky cursors that will “help us stand out”. But just like any project, you first need to stand back and actually ask why you are making a site in the first place.
It seems counterintuitive when we ask clients this question – especially if they don’t have an answer there and then! It’s important to have a website for your business so that it has a digital space to exist. If you own a fish and chip shop in Whitby, locals are going to know who you are and whether you serve good fish cakes or not. Now, if a tourist is coming to Whitby and they’re looking for lunch with plenty of other options available (there are over 50 fish and chip shops in Whitby), how do they know that your shop is the one to go to? They could ask locals in the street for their opinion, but realistically, no one does that. Most people now would hop onto Google and type in “Fish and Chips near me”. If you don’t have a website, you won’t show up – it’s that simple.
So now you know why you need a website, it’s time to tailor it to what your users need it for. Your Fish and Chip shop is hospitality focussed and works around the Business to Consumer (B2C) model. With this in mind, your website needs to do these things to help your users: tell them where you are and what time you open, and it needs to tell them what you serve. As a user, it needs to give people information quickly and efficiently so that they can make an informed decision if they’re having lunch at your shop or the one on the other side of the River Esk. Don’t overcomplicate your site with pages upon pages when you can get the job done with a simple landing page.
2. Intuitive Navigation
Now that you know who your audience is and what they need from your website, it’s time to think about how they navigate your website. At Hubspoke Media, there are a few pages that we try to include in all our sites, these are: Home, About and Contact. Now, you could compress this all down to one page, and that might be easier for some audiences, but having dedicated pages for information is a lot easier to take in, and delivers your users to the info they need much faster. Your Fish and Chip Shop might use the About page to talk about what’s on the menu, or it could share information on the people who work there, or the rich history of fishing in Whitby.
A contact page is one of the more important pages on your site, and even more important is getting that information correctly! Google pulls information from your website into its search queries, and with AI becoming ingrained in search platforms, it can pull even more information from your website. This is why it is so important to make sure you’ve got the correct phone number, address and email on your contact page so that you don’t risk missing out on any future customers
Being able to see the page options is also crucial to how long a user will stay on your site. If they can’t immediately see the information they need, why would they spend time on your site? We like to have our pages across the menu at the top, so it’s one of the first things the end user sees and makes navigating so much easier. If you have 10-15 pages, it might be easier to group some of the pages into “Services” or similar. The Fish and Chip Shop may have many pages for different types of food, so those pages could be under a group called “Menu Items”.
3. Personality
It’s often overlooked, but part of the user’s first impression will come down to your site, and in some ways, the businesses personilty. An easy way to inject some personality into any site is by adding high-quality imagery of people and places that users will recognise and engage with. Having a website filled with text and stock imagery is really disengaging for the brain to process, and will very quickly lead to people clicking off our site. Humans are biologically engineered to recognise and respond to other human faces – so this simple but effective change could make all the difference. Showcasing your location’s personality is also a massive help for those looking online, as if there’s anything in the branding or language used that they recognise, they have more of a chance of connecting.
Speaking of branding, it’s important that your business website actually looks like your business. Utilising brand guides and making sure that fonts and colours are consistent across pages will improve the user experience. If pages are changing text size, colours or even quality of imagery, users will get confused; and a confused user is less likely to buy into your “thing”.
4. Fresh, relevant content
Hubspoke Media recently completed a large website development project for the Journal of Management Studies (JMS), taking an outdated 20-year-old website and dragging it into the 21st Century. After it went live, the publishers got lots of positive comments on the new branding, the improved usability of the site and how much “better” it looked than the original. The information itself largely stayed the same, and functionally it wasn’t too much different compared to its predecessor. But the one huge change that we implemented to this site was adding fresh and relevant content. The old website had no personality, and therefore wasn’t the most interesting website to look at. We used historical imagery and videos to create a personality that showed current editors and events.
Including images was a massive step up, but making sure that the imagery was from recent events helps those first coming to the website see that this website is still in use and is actively engaging with its audience. Fresh content can also mean adding blog posts to your site. Search engines push active pages, and rank that activeness on things such as how often you update a site, the frequency of how often a site is crawled and user engagement. By posting informative, SEO rich blogs on a regular basis, search engines can see that your site is still relevant, and it should be pushed to people through search. Your blogs don’t have to be the next Charles Dickens, but ensuring that it uses good grammar and spelling helps build confidence in your reader – something we talk more about in SEO and searchability!
5. High-Quality Media
At this point, we have the foundations of our site, and we can start looking at the more creative aspects of building a site. Assuming you have a strong brand you are happy with for your business website, and it’s implemented consistently, you can then start to inject that personality into your website with high-quality media. It might not seem important to the quality of the imagery and videos you use, but this all comes down to the convert phase of the customer journey.
At this point, your Fish and Chip Shop in Whitby is flourishing; more people are seeing your shop through search, meaning even more people are choosing you over some of your competitors without a website. However, there are still a few people who are looking at your website and are not sold. If you are using low-quality, hard-to-read images to promote your products, then people aren’t getting the “full experience”. A customer’s first impression is crucial to their purchasing decision, so making sure that first impression is attractive and eye-catching is a must. If you don’t have the cameras to take those images, Hubspoke Media can capture your product, team and personality in a bespoke media session.
These images can then be used across banners, icons, buttons and advertising so that you can bring a level of professionalism to your site and marketing with very little effort.
6. SEO and Searchability
SEO is seen as a secret sauce to the success of any website. Whilst it is important to integrate SEO strategies into your website for higher search rates, it is very easy for people to get bogged down in the details. Simply put, Search Engine Optimisation (SEO) is the act of fine-tuning your website so that it has a higher chance of appearing on search engines when a query is entered. To optimise a website for search engines, we can look back at some of the points we have already covered (so the hard part is almost done!)
Including correct locations and opening times is important for SEO, as search engines want to give users the best information for their query. If a tourist searched for “Fish and Chip Shop near me” in the middle of Whitby, Google wants to provide the best, relevant results. If your site isn’t optimised for SEO and doesn’t include a location, it’s no good to search engines and therefore will not push your shop.
Having keywords on your site that are relevant and searchable also makes up a huge part of SEO. Using keywords such as “Fish and Chips” and “Whitby Restaurant” on your Fish and Chip Shop site is great for SEO (when used correctly) and gives search engines something else to use when narrowing down which business websites it’s going to push to users. If you want to learn more about SEO, then we encourage you to check out our “SEO for Beginners” video on YouTube.
7. Accessibility
Accessibility is an often-overlooked part of website development, but a crucial one! The Web Content Accessibility Guidelines (WCAG) is a simple and easy-to-implement method to keep your website accessible for all users. An accessible website is split into 4 main criteria, including:
- Perceivable
- Operable
- Understandable
- Robust
If a website ticks all of these boxes, it is an accessible website suitable for all users. Let’s breakdown there sections to see how you can embed them into your business website.
Perceivable
Users must be able to see, hear or otherwise perceive the content. This can be done by providing text alternatives such as Alt Text for images; ensuring content is adaptable, such as allowing text resizing; maintaining sufficient colour contrast (so, making sure your text colour doesn’t match the colour of the background it is sitting on); and making content available across different devices, including mobile
Operable
Users must be able to navigate and use the interface regardless of ability. This is such an overlooked part of a website, but users need to be able to USE the site for it to be good. Things you can do to ensure this include making sure all functionality is usable via keyboard without a mouse; visible focus indicators to show where the user in on the page (such as highlighting fields in a form); no content that triggers a seizure; and easy-to-use navigation, menus and controls.
Some of these things we have covered in menus and navigation, but it is crucial that you get those parts right so that anyone can use your website, regardless of any impairments they may have.
Understandable
Users must be able to understand the website’s content and how to use it. This means having information that is written clearly and predictably; navigation, layout and interaction behave consistently; form errors are explained clearly; and support features such as findable help so that users can get answers to any troubles they are having on the site.
Robust
Content must work reliably with a wide range of assistive technologies, such as screen readers, for example. To do this, ensure your site uses clean, semantic HTML; is compatible with various browsers and devices, such as mobile; whilst also maintaining code that is strong enough to be interpreted by current and future technologies. This last one makes sure that your website is accessible to those reading it in 50 years.
If you want to learn more about WCAG, click here.
8. Optimised on all devices
As was previously mentioned, making sure that your website is accessible across multiple devices. Think about the devices your user is most likely to use and make sure to cater to that experience. JMS had a lot of scholarly users who would type publications on their desktops, so it was important to optimise desktop users over mobile and tablet. From our analytics, we can see that mobile users are at nearly 50/50, so we optimised mobile too for users who are reading publications, not submitting them. If you were a tourist in Whitby looking for lunch at a local fish and chip shop, you would likely be searching this on your mobile phone, rather than on the computers at Whitby Library.
A website that is only optimised for desktop will look very odd on mobile. The padding of text won’t be correct, the layout of images will be nonsensical, and the overall page will look too small for the device. This will also affect how accessible it is to users, ultimately turning people away from your business website on mobile. Website building sites such as WordPress and Wix will often have a feature that automatically corrects your pages for different devices, but it’s always a good habit to check for yourself in a staging site.
9. Fast Loading Speeds
Having a sluggish website can be frustrating for you as a developer and the users searching for it. If your website is slow to load in imagery or text, there are a few things that might be the root issues. Large files can heavily slow down a site and its performance. Large media files, such as a JPEG that is 1MB-2MB is far more hefty to load than a 30KB WEBP file.
Videos also take up a lot of data on your site, so linking to YouTube or even embedding YouTube videos into your site can help improve site speeds. A website trying to load excessive HTTP requests on a single page is another cause of slow loading speeds. This is when a user loads a page, which requests the server to give that user the information on the page. If there is too much on one page, it will take longer for the server to give the user that information.
10. Secure Website
An easy way to make sure your website is great and user-friendly is by getting it an SSL Certificate. A Secure Sockets Layer (SSL) is an encrypted link created by a security protocol between the web server (where the website is hosted) and the web browser (where the user is viewing the website). How do users know if your website is secure? At the start of the web address, you will see the letters “HTTP”. We guarantee that you have seen this many times before and assumed all websites had it. HTTP stands for Hypertext Transfer Protocol Secure for those interested.
Ready to take your business online?
Now you have the theory it’s time to put it into action! We know that working on your business can be a lot harder than working in your business, which is why Hubspoke Media are here to help. From creating your a comprehensive brand kit to creating an optimised website that puts you infront of your target audience, we are here to help you grow your business online in 2026. Give us a call or fill out the contact form on our contact page!