Where to get website ideas and web design inspiration

With that said, here are my recommendations:

1. Follow smart people on LinkedIn (yes, really!)
2. Facilitate or attend ideation workshops
3. Analyse websites you use every single day – NOT your competitors
4. Scour through this library of 54 ways B2B & SaaS websites get more MQLs
5. Find inspiration on design discovery platforms like Dribbble and Awwwards

1. Follow smart people on LinkedIn

Yes, I know. There are all kinds of groups mocking the silly stuff people say on LinkedIn. I saw some of it first-hand but if you give the platform time and follow the right people, it’s actually a great source of inspiration.

If you’re specifically after website inspiration, here are the top three people to follow, each with unique niche of their own:

Casey Hill – formerly of ActiveCampaign fame, Casey is now part of DoWhatWorks, a platform that scrapes A/B test results from the Web and gives you the data on… what works and what doesn’t. Casey frequently posts examples of experiments and their success rates. Of course, that doesn’t guarantee the change will work for you, but it’s a great source of inspiration. He also often spotlights unique website features in a series of posts about how “[Company X] is the only company I know of doing this”.

Anthony Pierri – positioning is perhaps the biggest issue on SaaS websites, especially for first-time founders, during pivots, or when you’re scaling too fast for your own good after a round of funding. Anthony is your positioning guy on LinkedIn. Expect tons of infographics and frameworks with tangible examples, plus plenty of sarcasm about snake oil salesmen in the industry. 😂

Tas Bober – last but not least, for landing page content you should follow Tas. Once again you can expect a fair bit of banter, but also free landing page resources, frameworks on top of frameworks, detailed teardowns of existing landing pages, and much more.

Honourable mentions go out to the NerdCow team. Though we’re nowhere near as active on LinkedIn these days, you can go through the profiles of Dawid and Tomasz for a fair share of evergreen advice.

2. Facilitate or attend ideation workshops

Ideation workshops are one of our favourite ways to build websites. They’re challenging and require much more effort, but the outcomes are disproportionately worth it. They range from quick, 1-hour sessions like the Lightning Decision Jam (LDJ) to frameworks spanning multiple days, or even weeks, like the Design Sprint.

We use a modified version of the Design Sprint to build functional website prototypes in under two weeks. The process is extremely flexible. Some companies, including the likes of LEGO Group, use the Design Sprint to ideate physical products. These workshops are perfect for challenges that require tangible solutions, but LDJ can work for the intangible ones, too. Our weirdest use of it was to… decide on a Christmas party for our company. 😅 I’ll admit it wasn’t the best way to go about the problem, but we still ended up with a great solution!

3. Analyse websites you use every single day – NOT your competitors

This point is a bit of cheating on my part because it’s inspired by one of the exercises inside the Design Sprint. In the workshop, it’s called “Lightning Demos”, where you get a limited amount of time to demonstrate three potential solutions based on what you already know. There’s no time to search and browse – just whatever you remember.

The part I want to highlight about that exercise is what we recommend for people to do – look OUTSIDE of your industry. We’re not looking to borrow from your competitors and potentially copy something that doesn’t even work for them. The goal is to look through the lense of the challenge and try to recall a site that solved a similar challenge for you.

When you look to your competitors, you subconsciously skip several steps of the ideation process. You only see the solution, and not the problem or why it works. If you flip it and you think “hmm, when has a website made me trust it the last time?” you’re going to arrive at solutions that genuinely work – or at least they worked once, on you. 😉 That’s still better than guessing, isn’t it?

And even then, don’t copy these solutions directly! Think what’s different about your company and adjust it accordingly. Again, we’re looking for inspiration, not plug-and-play solutions.

4. Scour through this library of 54 ways B2B & SaaS websites get more MQLs

We gathered an insane amount of inspiration over the last two years of working with SaaS and software clients. We used to send them out as a newsletter, but these days we compile it into one massive resource. Our spreadsheet of 54 ways B2B & SaaS websites get more MQLs includes examples of solutions to challenges with product images, CTAs, dead clicks, landing pages, user funnels, messaging, and much more.

And to the tune of tip number three, the companies range from software for… dog groomers, all the way to the obvious names like Stripe and HubSpot. You’ll be lucky to find your competitor in there! Here’s a preview of the library:

5. Find inspiration on design discovery platforms like Dribbble and Awwwards

Last, and kind of “least”, we have the web designer & developer communities. They’re useful for inspiration, without a doubt. But at the same time, they require more caution than any of the previous methods.

Especially on Dribbble, the examples are highly speculative. They’re often showing of capabilities rather than painstakingly solving a problem. With that said, some of the examples have helped us ideate during workshops, so it’s once again a proven method.

Awwwards is different in the sense that it generally features real-world, published work. This doesn’t guarantee results, as websites often get highlighted in a subjective manner, but at the very least it’s work that someone deemed good enough to launch. Either way, as I preach throughout the article, this is purely for inspiration – I don’t advise copying anything.