36 High Quality Templates & Tutorials To Design Business Website

It’s a solid fact that real world companies have been trying very hard to infuse their brand into the web, due to the popularity of the internet. Apple knows about that, Coca-cola knows about that, even local fresh mart near my home knows about that.

For giant corporation like Nike, they can probably invest a small part of their fund to hire top-notch web designer to build an epic site, but for small companies without funds and design experience, it will be a crucial challenge for them to get their website existed online with nice design and functionality.

This post exists to solve this problem. Here we’ve collected 35 high quality resources which include WordPress themes, HTML templates, PSD mockups and even step-by-step tutorials to help you build a website that meets your business need. You can either download, work on a bit and put it online directly, or hire a web designer to perform the customization until it fulfills your company’s need.

Meanwhile, you can visit some of our collection posts to get more quality design resources:

• 40 (Really) Beautiful Web Page Templates in Photoshop PSD
  
• 40+ Beautiful “WordPress 3.0 Ready” Themes
  
• 55 Fresh & High Quality WordPress Themes
  
• 38 Free Elegant XHTML/CSS Website Templates
  
• 60 High Quality Free Web Templates and Layouts
  

HTML/CSS Templates

Art of Business

Designed by Template Monster, Art of Business provides you a completely professional corporate environment to showcase your company and products. I must say that the quality of this template exceeds most templates found in premium market.

Corporattica

Another very high quality site template built with brilliant typography, great color scheme, and professional content slider.

Euphoria

Although the site is originally designed for personal work showcase, the site design itself suits very well for business site also.

First

First stands out from common business templates with its fresh, creative and elegant design, making it a great choice for business user.

High Technologies

Just as its name suggests, IT Technologies is perfect for company related with tech.

Industrial Services

Here you go, a HTML5 powered, professionally designed layout with brilliant typography and corporate color scheme.

IT Technologies

Another nicely designed template which suits perfectly to tech-related company.

Lawyer And Attorney

While most business templates are designed with bright color scheme, Lawyer and Attorney offers you a dark yet elegant layout to showcase your company or service.

Mondays

If you are tired of business templates with heavy graphic and color scheme, Mondays probably meets your minimalistic needs with its clean and fresh design.

Smart Biz

Smart Biz is an universal business template with modern touch, which makes it compatible to most kind of business.

WordPress Themes

Boldy

Boldy is a professional WordPress theme released exclusively by Site5 for business user. It includes WordPress-specific features such as image slider, real-time contact form and Twitter integration.

Genoa

Genoa is a business-oriented WordPress theme designed with simplicity and elegance in mind. It also includes built-in page templates to allow you to change the way the content looks with different layouts.

Simplybiz

Just as its name, Simplybiz impresses your site visitor with its simplicity and professionalism. The theme also contains large shortcode collection which makes your works even simpler.

Webfolio

Webfolio comes with ads support, content slider and even Flickr photostream, absolutely a feature-rich theme for your various business needs.

Wise Business

Released by the same company that publishes Webfolio, Wise Business comes with business friendly features like testimonials page templates and real-time contact form with email validation.

PSD Templates

Hongkiat Exclusive: Polo360

Released exclusively by our site, Polo360 is suitable for a wide range of site like portfolio, product page or main business site. The best part of this Photoshop template is it comes with home page, about page, service page, portfolio page, and contact page design, almost everything you need to build a complete website.

Hongkiat Exclusive: Business

Yes, another high quality business template released by our site. The design features a clean, slick and professional layout ideal for modern company. The template also comes with necessary page design like home page, service page and portfolio page.

Corporatix

Designed by GraphicsFuel, Corporatix is a modern business template with completely slick and creative design. Although it looks quite complicated, graphic layers inside the template are well-organized for your easier customization.

Crims Nite

Crims Nite has a completely different design approach with common business template by judging on its color scheme, so it’s suitable for business user who prefers a very different look to his/her company’s site.

Exponet

Exponet is a well designed Photoshop template available to you with a home page and an about page design.

Handmade

Produced by Web Designer Raid, Handmade is another very slick Photoshop layout perfect for business site.

Interpoint

A Photoshop business template built with simplicity and elegance in mind.

Openmint

Besides its clean and modern layout, Openmint includes a content part in the footer area that features company’s partners, which is greatly desired by most companies.

Product Layout

Product layout is actually a freebie released by HVDesigns, followed by the tutorial that teaches how to create this slick layout.

Purios

An one page Photoshop layout with elegance applied, looks simply nice.

Terrion

This free advanced Photoshop template is purposefully designed to suit portfolio, agency or business site.

Tutorials

Create A Business Website Design

Guided by Journey Digital Media, this tutorial will show you the detail to design a clean and solid fictional business layout. You can download the finished result as a Photoshop file as well.

Create A Detailed Portfolio Homepage Design In Photoshop

Let the First Web Designer teaches you the true way to create a slick home page design well-suited for portfolio and business use.

Create A Professional Web 2.0 Layout

Published by web design giant PSDTuts, this tutorial will guide you to create a web 2.0 layout with many Photoshop techniques mentioned.

Create A Sleek, Corporate Web Design

From design to coding, you get to create a complete site template with corporate feel in this guided video series.

Create A Stylish Design Agency Website

An easy to follow tutorial to produce a business site that stands out from other designs.

Create An Amazing Personal Website From Scratch

Yet another comprehensive tutorial that teaches you to create a website from scratch with just shapes, layer styles and fonts. The result design of the tutorial suits very well to business site too.

Create An Extremely Simple Dark Web Design in Photoshop

Here comes a rare tutorial that walks you through the process of creating a dark-theme website layout which features an almost pitch-black color theme with some glowing elements for contrast.

Create Fantastic Landing Page

With proper use of spacing, typography and colors, you can create a professional landing page like below, just follow the tutorial!

Design A Beautiful Website From Scratch

From Nettuts, this tutorial will show you how to create a beautiful website with a modern touch.

Design A Clean Business Website

While most tutorials teach you to create a color-rich layout, this tutorial focuses on creating a very clean yet professional design for portfolio or small business use.

Reflection

Although WordPress themes and site templates showcased here can be put online directly, I strongly recommend business owner to hire a web designer to perform customization until the template matches your brand like logo, color scheme, etc. After all, a great web design should not just look good or function well, but represent the precious brand and the very purpose of the company.

We are willing to hear what you think about these business templates, and possibly your favorite template from this showcase post, sincerely thanks.

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10 Design Features Webmasters Should (Probably) Avoid

There are many questions and decisions made during web development, answering those questions of what to include and what to leave out is perhaps one of the hardest task to deal with. Hardest in a sense that until now, many webmasters still did not realize what netizens dislike in a website.

What will it be? Ask this question to yourself. It can be annoying pop-up, splash page that tests your patience or locked content that screws you up when you thought you finally got something you need. You don’t like these features, your visitor don’t like them too.

Below is a list of design features that every webmasters should probably avoid in order to brew an awesome website. The next time you update your website, or start on a new project, this article may help you in the process of considering what to avoid in your website.

1. Pop-up / Pop-under

Many people love surprises, but not the kind where an unsolicited ‘extra’ space popped right in front of the monitor without warning. There is a very good reason why modern internet browsers have built-in blockers to protect the unsuspecting users from these invasive advertisements, that is because people do not fancy being told what to look at.

Another point that webmasters should consider is that 99% of people who have spent a good time dealing with pop-ups and pop-unders already have developed a good reflex for closing every window in a second. Below is a fair example of what I am referring to.

(Image source: Wikipedia)

If I may add, this includes flash advertisements that expand and occupy half of the screen. Yes, like what Yahoo!’s homepage used to do. Pop-up domination also enters this category, where a website asks visitors to enter their e-mail address and name to sign up for the newsletter. I am not against this, in fact this is a good strategy to gather large subscribers, but it is not a suitable strategy for long run.

Avoid placing anything in front of the content as it tends to annoy everyone and disregard it instantly. Worse scenario? Visitors will leave. Take for example YouTube’s advertisements. 10 seconds into the video clip and an ad appears, what is the initial reaction? Find the close button.

2. Marquee Text (Or Anything That Moves)

There are only few websites that use this today as it is not a good approach because it functions like scrolling texts for the news on Television. Anything that moves can catch everyone’s attention, and it takes effort to disregard these objects.

3. Splash Page

Splash pages are cool only if the information a person wants is already there, or at least a summary of how awesome the website really is. There are websites that use splash page to advertise which is probably a bad idea.

For example, I have seen tons of these pages where visitors are required to sit through a 10 second advertisement before being redirected to the content.

4. Locked Content

This is a stunt that many websites pull just to increase their earning and subscriptions. It’s pretty odd that they let you touch a tool but won’t allow you to actually use it. ‘Sorry, you need to be premium to use that’. Of course revenue is important, but no matter how cool the website is, if it tricks people into thinking that they can use a feature but actually they can’t, that’s misleading.

Here is an example base on my experience, you googled and ask anything about web development, and what you might see is one of the top ranking site, Experts Exchange. The question is there, and answers are locked. I discovered this during my freshman year in college, studying Information Technology, it is not a pleasant experience.

5. Registration + No Proper Warnings

Learn from the awesome websites of today like Twitter. You can actually sign up for a Twitter account under 20 seconds. There are still lots of websites that ask their users to register and login to use certain features, and I’m not against that. What I am against is the hefty amount of data a website needs before you can use their service, like commenting.

Adding to this, there are still a lot of websites that do not incorporate proper warning system that tells you that a field is ‘required’ or ‘already taken’ and should be replaced. What happens then? After clicking ‘send’ all data are refreshed/erased and you’re back to step 1 just because you forgot one field. Take a look at Twitter’s registration page, bummer.

6. CAPTCHA

At first having a CAPTCHA is the best method to ward off spam on comments and registrations, but as life over the internet became quicker, people starts to hate this technology. In order to comment or register, the user will have to input a combination of letters and numbers correctly, which is usually not less than 5. I dare to say that CAPTCHA is one of the reasons why commenting on blogs and websites declined.

There is an easy fix for this, an intelligent spam filtering service called Akismet. Many websites are now using this, good bye to several minutes of trying to decrypt Da Vinci’s code.

Think of Akismet as the collective consciousness of all users; all spams are identified based on millions of users’ experience, then comments or trackbacks marked as spams won’t be posted on your website, unless you unmark them as spam. If Akismet is not our prime choice, you can opt for others as long as it is a convenient spam blocker.

7. Social Media Integration Toolbars

Apparently, many websites are now using these for you to easily connect with your friends at Facebook, Twitter, Yahoo, YouTube, you name it! There is too much social interaction nowadays that webmasters tend to think it’s a good thing to keep their visitors connected, but people don’t like too much of these as it will consume more space in your website. Instead of collecting a whole barrage of it, pick few that most users use.

8. Pagination

Content is king, but when the content is split into several pages the magic weakens. Even popular websites do this when they can just include it all in one place, especially when it’s all text. Say, a two thousand word article is divided into 3 pages, readers will have to click “next” to proceed. Doing this is not really cool, even though it adds to the revenue but very anticlimactic.

9. Irregular Window Size

There are websites that are great with horizontal scrolling, but this should not encourage you to design your website this way. Scrolling vertically is the universally accepted way to navigate a website, no buts. Although at times, screen resolution plays a great part in this, it is best to design a website that will fit in every resolution possible. Over 3 months ago I was still using a CRT monitor and almost every website I visit don’t support my screen’s resolution. I had to scroll horizontally every single page.

Another no-no is resizing your visitor’s web browser. Never resize for your comfort. Instead, be the one to adjust based on the visitors’ preferences.

10. Reset Button

Especially when it’s right beside the submit button on forms. People have now developed common sense to just hit F5 to refresh, they no longer need a button to do that. Think of it, there are now tablet computers like iPad and smart phones that rely on touch screen.

Tablet computers and smartphones’ touchscreens are smaller and only few people are using their stylus, making accuracy low. Imagine accidentally clicking reset button instead of submit after filling up a very long form. You get the picture.

One more: No Right Click

Aside from the fact that right-clicking is disabled, some will even go to the lengths of using JavaScript to pop-up a message saying it’s disabled. If a person is decided on copying your content, he will do it no matter how long it will take him.

Reflection

There are tons of ways to earn and make a website famous, ways that are less annoying. The only thing you need to remember is perseverance and high-quality content/service without these annoying features and designs.

(bellefoong)

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