Franchise Web Design

Franchise Web Design – How to Design a Top Quality Website

By: Frank DePino | April 5, 2024

Franchise web design must appeal to a wide and varied audience while still maintaining brand unity. A web design that’s not just functional but also attractive is a powerful tool for businesses, especially franchises. It helps you convey your brand to visitors and makes it easier to engage with your content.

In this post, we are discussing: 

  • Top 10 franchise website designs
  • The best strategies in franchise brand development
  • How to create a marketing funnel for franchises
  • What makes a good franchise web design?

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Top 10 Franchise Website Designs

Franchise websites are a great place to look for inspiration. With an established company name, brand, and products, owners must focus their efforts on marketing. If you’re thinking of starting your own franchise business, these sites should give you plenty of ideas:

1. McDonald’s

The web design of McDonald's franchise

McDonald’s is one of the most iconic fast-food brands of all time. Its website reflects this brand authority with a simple design that allows users to quickly and easily find what they need, whether it’s nutritional information, a list of locations, or information about hiring. The site is sleek, straightforward, and clearly communicates all relevant information: just like the brand itself!

2. Burger King

The design of Burger King franchise website

Burger King may be known for its flame-broiled burgers and Whopper sandwiches, but its website design is anything but a hot mess. With a layout that makes navigating from location to location easy and intuitive and an attractive color scheme that perfectly matches the logo, this site has everything you need to know about your favorite “have it your way” restaurant.

3. Subway

Subway franchise website and its design

Subway‘s website brings fun back into fast food with vibrant colors, fun music and sounds, and an interactive map with a store locator function. It also offers easy-to-find nutritional information and FAQs so that customers can get all the facts they need in one place.

4. Planet Fitness

The design of Planet Fitness franchise website

The Planet Fitness website is well organized, with each page clearly labeled and featuring a cohesive aesthetic. The bright colors and friendly vibe perfectly match the brand’s mission statement: “Making the world a happier and healthier place. It’s simple to navigate through pages and find what you’re looking for using the top navigation bar or the drop-down menu.

5. 7-Eleven

The web design of 7-Eleven franchise

7-Eleven has taken full advantage of its existing brand recognition by including its iconic logo on every page. They also use a minimal design that focuses on high-quality visuals, which is excellent for businesses that rely on brands to sell products.

6. Starbucks

Franchise web design: the home page of Starbucks

Starbucks is one of the most recognizable brands in the world. Their website reflects their brand as a trusted, familiar name that people turn to for comfort and joy. The Starbucks website is easily navigated, with clear calls-to-action easy to find and understand. It also features an engaging video that introduces visitors to the Starbucks brand story and provides them with a warm welcome. The overall feel of the site is smooth, relaxed, and inspiring.

7. Pizza Hut

The design of the Pizza Hut franchise website

Pizza Hut‘s website design is as straightforward as you’d expect from a pizza franchise. Their homepage has only two menu items: “Order Pizza” and “Checkout.” When you click on either of these options, it immediately takes you to the real meat of their site—their online ordering system—which makes it easy for customers to get exactly what they want. The rest of the site content revolves around this goal: making sure customers can easily order pizza whenever they want it.

8. KFC

The Kentucky Fried Chicken franchise website: focus on its design

The KFC website is clean and simple. The layout is easy to navigate, making it simple to find the information you need quickly and effectively. The site uses a consistent color scheme with a red background, white text, and gray links, making it easy on the eyes. The KFC website is also well-organized, with sections for the company’s history, services offered by its franchisees, and a list of locations that are available for purchase.

9. Ace Hardware

Franchise web design: the Ace Hardware website

The Ace Hardware website is also clean and simple. The layout is straightforward to navigate, making it simple to find the information you need quickly and effectively. The site uses a consistent color scheme with a red background, white text, and gray links, making it easy on the eyes.

10. Hooters

The Hooters website design

The Hooters website has all the elements of a great franchise website. It is simple yet appealing. Hooters’ menu is front and center — just what a hungry customer wants! The images are bright and inviting while still being tasteful. And, of course, they include the logo front and center at the top of the page, so customers know exactly where they’re at with just one glance.

What are the Best Strategies in Franchise Brand Development?

In franchise marketing, brand development is all about refining and expanding on a company’s existing identity. And with franchise brand development, a lot of the traditional marketing strategies that work for a single business don’t apply. The best strategy for success is to focus on the customer’s end goal and how their local business can help them achieve it.

Your franchisees will be using the brand to communicate with customers (and potential partners), and in the end, it’s their relationship with those customers that determine their success. To create a cohesive brand, you need to provide detailed guidelines for how your franchisees’ brands should look and feel. These guidelines should include:

  • A clearly defined brand voice and tone
  • Color palette restrictions and examples
  • Font restrictions and examples
  • Logo design specifications (if applicable)
  • Guidelines for product or service messaging

Once you’ve established your guidelines, use them as a basis for your franchise web design. You want all of your franchisees’ sites to share a consistent aesthetic—but within that aesthetic, you want each site to stand out as its own entity. This means giving each site its own unique color scheme, fonts, and so on while making sure they all follow the guidelines you’ve set out—and making sure they all use templates that meet your standards for style.

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How to Create a Marketing Funnel for Franchises

The most effective way to get your franchisees involved in promoting your brand and company is to create a simple, powerful marketing funnel that they can easily implement into their businesses. A marketing funnel is a system that helps businesses drive their sales. It takes leads through stages, where the goal is to get them to the bottom of the funnel and convert them into customers.

The first step in creating a marketing funnel for franchises is establishing your strategy. This involves deciding what you want the campaign to be about and who the target audience should be. It also includes determining what kind of content will best reach this target audience.

Next, it’s time for awareness. It would help if you got potential customers positively thinking about your brand. This can be done through social media posts, blog posts, infographics, and more! Once they have been made aware of your product or service, they are much more likely to consider it an option when making their next purchase.

Finally, it’s time to close the sale! You can use email marketing campaigns or other forms of direct outreach to speak directly with potential customers who have already shown interest in your product or service by making them aware of it previously through one of the previous steps (awareness). This allows you to make sure each person receives personalized messaging that speaks directly to their specific needs and wants while also helping you track how many people are responding positively vs. negatively. And this also helps you determine whether or not you’re on the right track with these campaigns!

Zara is a franchise with an outstanding website design

What Makes a Good Franchise Web Design?

If you’re looking to build a franchise website or re-design an existing site, then look no further than these ten elements:

1. Use a compelling web design theme

One of the first things you should consider is the theme of your design. The theme ties together all of the different elements on your site, from the color scheme to the font. While it may be tempting to choose a design theme based on what’s popular in web design, this may not be a good long-term strategy. You want your franchise website to have a timeless look that will stand out for years to come, so try to pick a theme that will be as relevant today as it was ten years ago.

2. Use Compelling Images

Images and font styles work together to create an engaging design. This is why it’s important to choose an appropriate font style that matches the images on your website’s homepage. Try using bold headlines and subheads, but don’t overdo it—if you make every piece of text larger than life, your website will look cluttered and unprofessional. Instead, pick one typeface you like and stick with it throughout most of your site (except for large headlines).

3. Create a unique logo for your franchise website

One way to make sure visitors recognize your brand is by coming up with an original logo for every franchise location. You can use this as part of your web design theme by including it in the header or footer of each page. The color scheme should be consistent with other elements on the page so that users can easily identify where they are within the site hierarchy when navigating from one page to another.

Navigating the Mc'Donalds website is very simple and intuitive

4. Make sure the franchise site is easy to navigate

You want your franchise website to be easy for visitors to navigate so that they can quickly find what they’re looking for. This means that you should have a logical website framework in place and include a search function if you have a lot of content on your site. A well-organized navigation bar, clear headings, and consistent page layouts will make it easy for consumers to get where they want to go on your website. You don’t want your customers to choose another franchise because yours was too hard to find information on!

5. Use a mobile-friendly web design

With how prevalent smartphones are today, it’s not surprising that most people search for local businesses on their phones instead of desktops or laptops. This is especially true for franchises with multiple locations spread out over a wide area. If your franchise web design isn’t mobile-friendly, it won’t display properly on mobile devices and you could lose out on customers who can’t easily find the information they want from your website.

6. Incorporate special graphics and icons into your website design

Customizing your site with special graphics, illustrations, and icons can make all the difference in how it’s perceived. You want to make sure that the graphics are appropriate for the business you do and that they fit the overall theme of your site. A web design that uses icons and graphics to highlight key information can be more appealing than one with just text. It also helps visitors quickly find what they’re looking for by using colors and visuals instead of words.

A franchise is using its social proof to get more customers

7. Share social proof by including customer reviews

If you already have happy customers who love what you do, why not show it off? There’s no better way to demonstrate value than letting other people say great things about what you offer. Reviews are the best way to get people interested in your product or service because they provide an honest look at how good it is from someone who has actually used it. Sharing these reviews on your website will help build trust with potential customers who might be hesitant about purchasing something new.

8. The franchise site should have strong content

Good franchise web design should have strong content with valuable information for potential customers. Focus on creating content that answers questions about your industry and provides value to those interested in learning more about it—this can be anything from blog posts with tips for getting started in your industry to videos with interviews of experts in related industries.

9. Your home page has to be optimized for SEO

Search engine optimization (SEO) is the practice of optimizing a website so that it ranks higher in search engines when people search for certain phrases related to your business. The higher your site appears in search results, the more likely people are to visit it; and the more traffic your site gets, the more likely people are to become leads (and eventually customers).

SEO optimization is critical to any company that does business online, but it’s especially important if you’re selling franchises. That’s because prospective franchisees are going to be doing a LOT of research online before deciding which companies they want to invest in. If your website isn’t optimized for search, they might not even find out that you exist!

10. Focus on calls-to-action (CTAs) and lead generation strategies

When users land on your pages, you have to let them know what they should do and why they should choose your business over competitors. CTAs let users know the next step they should take, while lead generation strategies help you get the most value from each of your web pages.

Elevate Your Luxury Brand Today

Schedule Your Free Consultation

Seeking to elevate your luxury business? Let Mediaboom guide you. Secure your exclusive, free consultation with our luxury marketing experts today.

To Conclude

Your website is the best first impression you can give your customers. If you’re a franchise, that means it needs to be a good one—and also needs to fit in with the brand. If you are interested in marketing services for your business, Get in touch! Our digital experts can help you take your franchise to the next level.

By: Frank DePino

Frank DePino is Principal and Founder of Mediaboom. Since 2002, Frank has led Mediaboom’s award-winning staff of creative and technical professionals, building the most effective marketing and advertising solutions for its clients.

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