A business website has one job: help a specific person take a specific next step. Everything that does not serve that is decoration.
Start with questions, not pages
Before drawing anything I list who arrives and what each of them is asking. A farmer, a dealer and a job seeker walk through the same front door with completely different questions, and the navigation has to serve all three without becoming a sitemap.
Pages come out of those questions. That is why a corporate site organised by intent reads more clearly than one organised by internal structure — the org chart rarely matches how anybody actually searches.
Few patterns, applied consistently
- Heading → summary → detail → next action.
- One primary action per page; everything else is secondary.
- Metadata in a quieter register, so the page reads in three passes.
- The same pattern on product pages, company pages and story pages.
Consistency at that level is what makes a forty-page site feel like one thing. A large component library without a shared content pattern produces the opposite: forty pages that are individually polished and collectively incoherent.
Mobile is the primary layout
For most business and agribusiness audiences, the phone is where the traffic lands — often on a patchy connection. So the mobile layout is designed, not shrunk. That usually means fewer columns, larger type, and the primary action reachable without scrolling.
Resist inventing numbers
In a corporate context, a page that overstates in year one is a liability in year two — someone will ask which report produced the number.
The checklist I actually use
- 01Can a first-time visitor say what this company does after five seconds?
- 02Is the primary action obvious on every page, on a phone?
- 03Does the navigation reflect intent rather than org structure?
- 04Is every claim on the page something I could defend?
- 05Does it still read correctly at 360px wide?
Written by Huzaifa Ahmed