Web design inspiration from the world’s fastest growing companies

7 minute read

Bob Dylan once said: “Inspiration is hard to come by. You have to take it where you find it.”

Which is all well and good when you’re a Grammy, Golden Globe, Oscar-winning singer/song-writer with all the time in the world to craft and compose songs.

But what if you’re a web designer with a new company to get off the ground and a roster of clients who always set deadlines for yesterday?

At tsoHost, we provide domain names and hosting services to hundreds of such designers.

So, we know, that they often have no choice but to take a more proactive approach to finding inspiration.

With this in mind, we’ve looked at the websites of seven of the world’s fastest growing companies.

These businesses have three-year revenue growth rates of up to 75,000 per cent and actual revenues of hundreds of millions of pounds.

So, they must be doing something right with their online offering right?

Below is a roundup of exactly what…

PopSockets

PopSockets makes mobile phone mounts and grips that allow customers to hold their phones more comfortably when taking selfies. Remarkably, the company has grown 71,000 per cent in the last three years.

Its website makes a big statement above the fold that changes topically. For example, when Harry and Megan gave birth to their son this whole section was taken up with a billboard-style image that simply said ‘It’s a Boy’ and offered a small call to action for customers to earn 10 per cent off PopSockets’ ‘Blue’ range.

Relegating all company info and product information to the area below the fold might have once seemed like too much of a risk to web designers.

However, this sort of approach brings PopSocket’s peppy, unapologetic branding to life. It’s also full of humour, which has been shown to up brand loyalty amongst consumers.

Home Chef

A producer of home delivered recipe kits, Home Chef has an eye watering revenue of 196 million pounds.

The hero section of its website is 80 per cent video footage. As mentioned in our earlier blog ‘A beginner’s guide to video marketing’, adding a video to a home page or landing page can increase conversions by up to 80 per cent.

In the remaining 20 per cent of the homepage there’s an area of white space and the headline ‘How it works’ to prevent a false bottom effect and encourage visitors to keep moving through the content of the site.

Of course, if you’re going to have a hero that’s mainly video, you’re going to need powerful hosting. Like the sort of hosting you get at tsoHost – it’s speedy, it’s secure and it comes with 99 per cent uptime.

Aeronux

Aeronux Airways is a private jet company that’s grown 20,000 per cent in the past three years. Its premise is ‘you can’t afford to waste time and money on commercial flights’.

It takes this acknowledgement that its customers don’t like to waste time and implements it on its website through the use of mouse effects.

Customers can hover over sections of copy and an effect, similar to flipping a playing card over, will instantly reveal additional copy, saving the user from having to click on a ‘read more’ button or scroll for further information.

The Aeronux website also features a prominent chatbot. Landing page creators Leadpages found that adding a chatbot to the landing pages of their own website created a ‘fast lane’ for leads, upping conversion rates by 36 per cent.

DGC International

Global defence solutions provider DGC International has a revenue of 137 million pounds.

Logistics isn’t always the most fascinating of topics. So, on duller sections of its website, for example the page where it lists its services as logistics, global operations, mission support, training and philanthropy, it utilises a cinemograph.

Cinemographs are still photographs, drawings or animations in which a minor and repeated movement occurs. In the DGCI cinemograph bubbles evanesce from the surface of a still world. These sorts of effects have been shown to keep viewers eyes engaged on a page and to offer an element of delight to web content.

Podium

In addition to being one of the fastest growing companies of 2019, software company Podium was also christened as one of the most innovative businesses of the year.

Its focus on innovation is obvious in its online offering. Its website blends contemporary web design ideas, from asymmetrical layouts and overlaying to the use of bold and eye-catching typography that includes animation on headlines.

Just like Aeronux Airways, Podium has a prominent chatbot. The company’s web designers follow chatbot best practice, by keeping the bot unobtrusive. It simply waits for users to engage with it in the bottom right hand corner of the page.

Brooklinen

Now growing by around 9,000 per cent every three years, the bed linen company Brooklinen went from a Kickstarter campaign to the 40 million pound business within the flash of an eye.

It’ll be immediately obvious to any web designer that the Brooklinen website is flawlessly branded. The grid layout has been chosen to bring the specifically toned Brooklinen copy and its immaculate images to life.

Web design elements have been cleverly combined to give the website the feel of an Instagram account or Pinterest page, showing Brooklinen off as an essential part of a lifestyle and not just a range of bed sheets.

SwanLeap

With a revenue of more than 75 million pounds, SwanLeap is a logistics and transportation company that’s been nicknamed ‘the eBay of freight’.

The company is acutely focussed on innovation – in a recent tweet it said: “Extinction is guaranteed by birth. No matter how good your idea is today, it will eventually be irrelevant. We have to let the inevitability of death drive us to continually innovate.” – and its website is no exception to this focus.

One of the first things you’ll notice on the SwanLeap website is that its hero area is interactive. When users move their cursor around this area, they can manipulate a bright white orb and a set of lines attached to it.

It may seem like a useless function, but it adds an element of surprise and delight to the site. It also hones a user’s focus onto the area by encouraging them to look at it twice.