Smart Software Web Design  Inspiration

Let’s take a look at some of the best SAAS website designs on the web, and analyze what they’re doing to drive sales and high conversion rates.

Zendesk

Zendesk is a SAAS support ticket management tool that is revolutionizing the customer support processes of over 20,000 companies.

Screenshot of www.zendesk.com

Their design team’s clever use of customer segmentation, over-sized photography, and playful zen cartoons collide into a beautiful website that has no trouble driving sales. They highlight some of their well known customers’ brands, providing instant validation that it’s a tool worthy of enterprise level service. On the flip side, the playfulness of their graphics (tech support buddha) speak to small businesses, which are also a target audience.

Campaign Monitor

Campaign Monitor is hosted email marketing software targeting web designers and developers as resellers. Their software makes it easy to send beautiful email newsletters that attract new subscribers, and see stunning reports on the results.

Screenshot of www.campaignmonitor.com

A simple, understated design with a contrasting solid background allows the design team to psychologically focus your attention where they want it, nudging you to create a free account and get started. Similar to Zendesk, they also show off some of their well known clients to build trust.

Basecamp

Basecamp is a hosted project management tool that makes it dead simple to keep track of project discussions, files, and events from beginning to end—all in one place.

Screenshot of basecamp.com

The 37 signals design team has AB tested the shit out of this website, and the result is a super simple, no-thrills, white and black design that sells like Samuel L. Jackson in Pulp Fiction.

Squarespace

Squarespace is an elegant, compact content management system that focuses on providing businesses with a simple way to publish content online.

Screenshot of www.squarespace.com

Super clean typography combined with an elegant use of white space, contrast and over-sized photography help bring this sales website to another level. Immediately you understand what the service provides, and it doesn’t take long to be sold on it’s value.

Box.com

Box.com (formerly Box.net) provides a hosted software solution that makes sharing, accessing and managing content and documents ridiculously easy.

Screenshot of www.box.com

The Box design team has carefully crafted the way they layout content to emphasize the selling points that customer’s care about. They do an amazing job of leaving out the typical crud that customers don’t care about. This is a tremendously productive approach to organizing a website for sales.

Ballpark

Ballpark is time tracking and invoicing software that is used by thousands of successful freelancers and companies worldwide.

Screenshot of www.getballpark.com

Large, prominent images, and a super clean use of white space make this a great software website that sells. Clean icons focus on the frequently used, most valuable aspects of the software, helping to sell the software by emphasizing the business benefits. Everything you need to make an informed purchasing decision is on one page. There’s no digging to find answers to your customers, everything is at your finger tips.

WordPress VIP

WordPress VIP is a premium hosting and support service for enterprise WordPress.com clients. It provides high volume WordPress websites scalability and an impressive SLA on the WordPress.com cloud.

Screenshot of vip.wordpress.com

By now, you should be seeing a trend fluent throughout these examples. Simple, solid backgrounds with high contrast between type is used in this design. A customer centric content focus explains the 3 core business benefits of the service, and additional pages are provided to help customers learn about the service, specifically:

  1. What it is
  2. Who uses it
  3. How much it costs

In Conclusion

Designing an incredible SAAS website that sells isn’t rocket science. There are well established design patterns and approaches you can follow to ensure that your website not only looks great, but also sells like Samuel L. Jackson in Pulp Fiction. Based on the examples we’ve explore above, you can hopefully decipher a few best practices to follow if you’re considering a redesign for your software company, or if you’ve been hired to design one yourself.

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Meet the Author

Kevin Leary, WordPress Consultant

I'm a freelance web developer and WordPress consultant in Boston, MA with 17 years of experience building websites and applications. View a portfolio of my work or request an estimate for your next project.