Business Website Development; The Most Popular Business Websites

Tweet by Caragh Logan

By examining the 10 most popular business websites (as determined by their Alexa Global Traffic Rank), we can consider what our own business website development should involve and how to describe this to our web development agency.

Although it is important to point out that these website would receive such high volumes of traffic due to their brand, it is worth considering their design options as they will have made use of a large digital budget to get their website design to their exact specifications. Whilst the specifications for your own business website development may not be the same, it is worth researching from those that have done it the best.

1.     The first most popular business website is Yahoo! Finance http://beta.finance.yahoo.com/. Making use of a navy, corporate colour palette, Yahoo’s beta finance site is easily navigated due to its clear and concise magazine layout.

2.      CNN Money http://money.cnn.com/ also uses navy but adopts a slightly different layout, with the majority of its information hidden under the fold.

3.      The Wall Street Journal http://europe.wsj.com/home-page uses black and grey colouring with a busy layout. The landing page is packed full of content, allowing for as many keywords as possible to be included for SEO purposes. The footer is deliberately large, to include as many options as it can hold.

4.      Google Finance http://www.google.com/finance is laid out in typical Google style; the page is easy to navigate and packed full of top stories, calls to action and summaries.

5.      MSN Money Central http://money.msn.com/ uses a bright green for its header – green is the colour most associated with trust – and is laid out in columns. In order to aid navigation each column has header tab menus.

6.      Business Week http://www.businessweek.com/ makes use of a variety of colours and uses lists, menus and scroll through stories to aid navigation. The landing page is less packed than the previous sites we have visited.

7.      Bloomberg http://www.bloomberg.com/ utilises orange and makes more use of images than the above sites.

8.      Forbes http://www.forbes.com/fdc/welcome_mjx.shtml loads an advert before the user can proceed to the main landing page, which includes top stories in each sector, special features, photo galleries and videos. The first business site in the top ten to embrace a real interactive user experience.

9.      Marketwatch http://www.marketwatch.com/ is by far the busiest site in this top ten, with breaking news running through the site’s header. The site makes use of green and blue and includes a multitude of information within its landing page, thus including as much SEO data as possible. Again, a large footer features.

10.  Business Insider http://www.businessinsider.com/ uses deep blue and large imagery, with text links towards the bottom of the landing page and a large footer.