11 Remarkable Website Layout Examples To Inspire Your Web Design

First impressions matter. Your online store’s website is the face of your brand, so it needs to look visually appealing to captivate and convert customers. But what makes a website look great? A lot of things: a clear navigation menu, uniform color palette, high-quality photos, and engaging CTA buttons. Underpinning all of these elements is a well-designed layout.

Website layout designs form the structural basis for web content that projects a positive brand image and facilitates product discovery. Done right, website layouts entice visitors to navigate, browse, and buy.

Here are effective website layout ideas and tips for picking a website design theme that matches your business vision.

Best practices for creating a stellar website layout

• Establish clear goals
• Design for intuitive navigation
• Think about CTA placements
• Consider visual hierarchy
• Aim for simplicity
• Optimize negative space

A layout determines where the visual elements will appear. With a few website design tips, you can keep those visual elements organized:

Establish clear goals

Your layout should align with your website’s goal. For example, a professional photographer’s portfolio website might drive visitors to fill out a contact form to inquire about their services. A retailer with a large product catalog might focus on promoting its new collections. A blog or news website would prioritize readability so visitors can spend as long as possible reading on the site. Think about what you would like your visitors to do once they get to your website and select a design that helps them accomplish it.

Design for intuitive navigation

A good website layout organizes information in a way that’s easy for site visitors to digest. Without intuitive navigation, visitors can get lost and frustrated, which can affect the customer experience. Here are a few ways to make your website more intuitive:

• Opt for concise menus: Menus with too much information might make it difficult for visitors to find information.
• Use clear menu labels: For example, if you run a hair care brand, you might use labels like “shampoo,” “conditioner,” and “leave-in conditioner,” instead of the product names that new visitors may not recognize.
• Add navigational breadcrumbs: Breadcrumbs are an aid to help customers understand where they are within a site’s structure.
• Group similar items: For example, placing your About page and FAQ page in the same section of your website will help customers who want to learn more about you.

Think about CTA placements

Calls to action (CTAs) encourage users to take a desired action, such as sign up for your newsletter or check out a sale to help clear inventory. Placing CTAs in a prominent place, like above the fold, can increase the number of people who see it and can signal to audiences that this is important information.

Consider visual hierarchy

Visual hierarchy guides visitors’ focus. For example, a bolded hero copy on your homepage will likely capture their attention first.

There is more to visual hierarchy than typography. Page scanning patterns, or how a users’ eyes move as they read a page, should also influence how you display content. Here are a few patterns to know:

• Z pattern: In pages with sparse text, readers will likely scan in a Z shape, starting at the top left corner, the top right corner, then diagonally to the bottom left and finally the bottom right. If you have a page with less information, you can put important elements, like logos, CTAs, and important text along the Z. This type of pattern isn’t as useful for cultures that don’t read left to right.
• F pattern: F patterns are useful for text-heavy pages or those that include videos. Here, viewers’ eyes will move in an F shape, going from the top left to the right and then focusing more on the left side of the page.
• Layer-cake scanning pattern: On a page featuring headings and subheadings, readers will scan titles and decide what information is worth reading. In an eyetracking heat map, this pattern shows up as horizontal stripes sandwiched between blank spaces.

To choose the right type of pattern, you can install a heatmap app like MIDA to track how users read your website. Add your most important information in the areas where visitors spend most of their time.

Aim for simplicity

Simple arrangements are clear and easy to navigate since there aren’t too many elements competing for their attention. “I often see too much on a homepage rather than not enough,” Sara Mote, creative director and cofounder of website design agency Mote, says. “You want to make sure you’re not overwhelming someone with too much information at once. It’s about weaving a story of the brand throughout the site ensuring that when someone lands on your homepage, they have a clear sense of your brand and your product offerings. As they journey through the site, you offer more details.”

To simplify, start with a theme that has all the basic structural components you need and customize it to fit your brand aesthetic. You can try Horizon, a minimalist theme that allows for customization.

Focusing on performance can also result in a simpler website, as Rembrant Van der Mijnsbrugge, software engineer and Sara’s cofounder, points out. “Minimal can be good. There are a lot of great brands that are minimal, like Apple,” Rembrant says. You can stand out through your typography, colors, logo, and curation.

Optimize negative space

Negative space, also known as white space, adds breathing room to a layout. It enhances readability and reduces visual clutter on your store’s pages. There are different types of white space. Micro white space is the space between smaller layout elements like between paragraphs and letters. Macro white space is the space around design elements like hero images, CTA buttons, and the margins of a site.

While white space is important, there is such a thing as too much white space. If your layout looks unbalanced or makes it difficult to find something specific, then it’s likely too much white space.

Website layout ideas

• Hero section
• Grid
• Carousel
• Split screen
• Multiple columns
• Single page

No one layout will work for every business. Here are a few to consider that can complement your brand identity and match your target audience’s expectations:

Hero section

The hero section, known as hero area or hero banner, is the prominent section at the top of a website’s homepage. With an image or video and bold, concise text, you convey the website’s core message or value proposition. Elements of the hero section include the navigation bar, company logo, featured image, text block, and call-to-action button or link.

There are a few ways you can set up your hero section:

Full-screen hero image

A full-screen or featured-image layout applies an image as the background that fills the hero section of the page, which sits above the fold (the area of the screen visible before you start scrolling). Header copy, a call to action, and the navigation menu are overlaid on the image. Full-screen images are a great layout option when you want the visitor to focus on a single graphic that shows off what your website offers.

Kai Collective, founded by Fisayo Longe, is a London-based women’s clothing brand. The homepage above the fold greets visitors with a stunning fashion shot in vibrant color. The text overlay for the navigation bar uses a thin sans-serif font that contrasts against the background without being overbearing. The text overlay featuring a seasonal product line is bigger, bolder, and clickable.

The featured image can also be more minimalist. Take the beauty brand Klur. Its homepage features a full-bleed black-and-white image, without any copy—aside from the brand name and navigation items at the top and a thin banner with a tagline at the bottom. The image also stretches below the fold for an immersive feel. It taps into the ritual of skin care, which aligns with the brand’s ethos.

“People equate their skin care routine to a sense of calm, to a sense of serenity,” Rembrant says. “We’ve designed the website for Klur that evokes a sense of calm, a sense of ease, a sense of serenity.”

Animated hero

A variation on the full-screen homepage backdrop, full-screen animations can increase user engagement with attention-grabbing moving images that show your product in action.

A good example is Mancini Pastificio Agricolo. The homepage features a full-screen video of wheat being harvested. The company grows and harvests durum wheat that it then uses to make pasta, so the video provides a peek into that process, which is central to its brand identity. The homepage dedicates a lot of real estate to this video, and it also includes a CTA that reinforces how its growing practices are at the heart of its pasta.

Split-screen hero

Animations can also take up part of the screen. Tonraum, a pottery studio in Austria, uses the Horizon theme to display a video on the right side of the screen. It shows someone throwing from different angles, giving visitors an idea of what they can expect if they take a class.

Grid

Grid design places page elements in boxes or cards on a geometric grid. Visitors can click boxes to go to a different web page. The number of boxes can change as you scroll down the page. So the header section might be a single full-width box, with smaller boxes down below. Grid layouts are great for featuring products and specific categories while preserving the distinctiveness of each item.

Symmetrical grid

Below the hero section of the website for Ell Soll, a fashion brand that uses the Horizon theme, you’ll find rows for new arrivals and bestselling items. Each “card” is the same size, with ample negative space around it, bringing uniformity and breathing room to the design. It’s a classic layout you’ll see on many ecommerce sites.

Asymmetrical grid

For a more fluid, flexible card design, check out how the dash. website lays out stationery products. Cards vary in size and width, creating an asymmetrical layout that adds visual interest to the grid layout.

Carousel

A carousel is a space-saving layout that uses a merry-go-round technique to display several pieces of content in the same area. The carousel moves automatically, a step at a time, or manually when the visitor clicks an arrow. A carousel usually combines a clickable image with brief text, like a CTA. Carousels are great for featuring content like products, promotional items, and special offers. They can appear above the fold or in mid-sections of the web page.

The Marché Rue Dix store uses a carousel layout to show a set of skin care products—more than can fit on the width of a laptop or mobile device screen. Users click the arrows to slide through the image set. A combination of images and concise text helps users identify the product, and hovering over the image displays a different view of the product.

Split screen

The split-screen layout divides the web page into halves. The halves in split-screen designs can represent two distinct pathways into the site. One half could be an image, the other text. Or both halves could be images. Split screens are popular for ecommerce websites that want to make a striking impact through product imagery and information about the products.

Some split-screen layouts aren’t equal in ratio. Common ratios are 40:60 or 33:66. Crown Affair is an example of a brand that uses a 33:66 ratio to get visitors to its blog where customers can learn more about repairing their hair.

MISStoMRS sells themed, customizable bridal boxes. Its split-screen section features an image of a bridal box on one half of the split. The other half features text information about the boxes with prominent call-to-action buttons.

Multiple columns

You can design website layouts with multiple columns in many formats. Often the column layout will consist of a main text column and a sidebar column. You might vary the number of columns as the user scrolls down the page for a magazine layout that balances the images and text.

Multiple columns complement text-heavy web pages on desktop and laptop devices because readers quickly get fatigued when reading text that spans the entire horizontal width of the page.

As visitors scroll down the Bloomtown Flowers homepage, they see a two-column layout. The left-hand column displays a flower photo, and the right-hand column contains “About the company” text. At the bottom of the page, the text-heavy sections for “Terms of Service,” “Shipping,” and “Tuber Guarantee” appear in a tidy three-column format.

Single page

In a single-page layout, content appears in a single vertical area running down the page. Uncomplicated and easy to use, site visitors simply scroll down the page to see more content. Single-column layouts work great on both desktop and mobile devices because they adapt well to different screen sizes. For websites with minimal content and a simple purpose, a single web page works well.

Jazz up single-page layouts with the creative use of parallax scrolling effects, which gives the impression of three-dimensional layering and movement. A case in point is Active Hop, a beverage company that uniquely anchors its navigation menu in the center of the screen, rather than the top, along with an animated 3D image of the product. Additional information moves behind the centerpiece as you scroll with a parallax effect. While this isn’t technically a one-page layout, as clicking on links opens new pages, one-column scrolling is the foremost layout feature.