Social Media Marketing for Business

Three seconds…if you’re lucky. Then they’re gone.

This is about how long we have to catch people’s attention, and get them to stay on our website. So first impressions count and design is instrumental.

How do we standout, pop off the page and make a lasting impression on new website visitors?

One of the quickest ways to answer this question is to learn from others.

At Crayon we have collated over 13 million web design examples that marketers can use for inspiration.

We ran our usage data between May and June to bring the most recent statistics on what thousands of marketers agree are the most useful web designs.

I’m about to share the top 30 with you.

They are broken up into three separate categories:

• Top 10 Most Viewed Web Design Examples
• Top 10 Most Liked Web Design Examples
• Top 10 Most Saved Web Design Examples

Top 10 most viewed web design examples

The following web designs represent the most viewed pages by users over a 30 day period, spanning from May to June.

1. Campaign Monitor

2. Patreon

3. Health Equity Labs

4. Quartz

5. Purch

6. Wildcraft

7. Telerik

8. Lexalytics

9. PromoJam

10. Chegg

Top 10 most liked web design examples

The following designs represent the most “liked” pages by users over a 30 day period, spanning from May to June.

1. Whole Foods

2. Campaign Monitor

3. Celery

4. WebDAM

5. Brandwatch

6. Tydy

7. Fresh Service

8. Rival IQ

9. NextView Ventures

10. HubSpot

Top 10 most saved web design examples

The following designs represent the most “saved” pages by users to their profile on Crayon over a 30 day period, spanning from May to June.

1. Campaign Monitor

2. Health Equity Labs

3. Patreon

4. Purch

5. Telerik

6. PromoJam

7. Shopify

8. Quartz

9. Lexalytics

10. Chartbeat

A breakdown of all 30 examples:

What’s interesting about this list of companies is the variety of company size, industry and inception.

While it’s great (and somewhat expected) to see brands like Whole Foods, Shopify and HubSpot, it’s just as encouraging to see marketers learning from lesser known and/or more niche companies as well.

What’s also interesting to note about the data is that just because a design is viewed, it’s not always liked or saved. The only brand to make the top 10 across views, likes and saves is Campaign Monitor.

Most popular page types

Now that we’ve seen the most popular designs, the nest step is to learn what page types are most interesting to marketers.

To do this, we examined all of the designs on each of our top 10 lists. The design page types include home pages, landing pages, press pages…etc.

According to our data as seen below, marketers are most interested in seeing examples of home pages which represents 52% of the most popular designs.

After home pages, marketers are most interested in seeing landing pages, which is understandable considering the success of companies like Unbounce and Optimizely.

Interior site pages generating the most interest from design marketers include press pages, team pages, jobs pages and about pages.

Company type

Do marketers gravitate towards a certain type of company when looking for design inspiration?

We had to get to the bottom of this question to determine if users were mostly looking at big brands, or certain industries or new companies that are being featured in tech publications across the globe.

The results are as follows:

While users engage with designs from the software industry most often at 43%, there is then a fairly even distribution comprised of marketing/advertising, media, consumer goods and technology.

IT & services and private equity round out the group, each representing a 5% share.

Company size

According to our data, it doesn’t matter if a company has 10 employees or 10,000; good design is good design as the usage distribution is shown below:

Years in business

Interesting to note that the companies whose designs are interacted with the most have been around for an average of 9 years.

While 9 years isn’t considered a legacy company by any stretch, it’s certainly enough time to get out of the “start-up” world and operate as an established and thriving company.

Color palettes

Curious how your brand colors match up against the most popular designs?

Below you’ll see color distribution for over 20 of the most popular designs on Crayon. See anything you like?

While Blue is the most consistent theme, what you’ll find is that most of these palettes are unique.

Some of the color palettes displayed above clash while others blend perfectly together, but most look different than the others.

Find your own style!

Go off and find your inspiration

As marketers, we often hear that inspiration can and should come from all around us. What’s great to see about the data highlighted in this article is the diversity amongst the most popular designs.

Just because a company has a well-known brand, that doesn’t mean you should do as they do. Similarly, there’s a lot marketers can learn by discovering designs from unrelated industries and companies of all shapes and sizes.

So stop waiting, get outside of your comfort zone and go explore the world of design!

Meet Dan Slagen

Dan Slagen currently leads Marketing at Crayon. A frequent speaker and guest contributor at VentureBeat, Dan has been featured in the New York Times, Bloomberg TV, WSJ, Forbes, Business Insider and many more. He currently advises startups, marketplaces, and marketing departments on strategy, revenue growth, and operations.