Elevate Your Brand With a Professionally-Built Cannabis Website

Your website is your potential customers’ first impression of your company. A professional, beautifully-styled website that clearly showcases your company’s offerings is vital to establish credibility and entice visitors to buy from or work with you. In this article, we dive deeply into what professional cannabis web designers can do for your business, what to know before hiring a design firm, and how to select the best web designer to bring your unique cannabusiness to life.

What Professional Web Design Can Do for Your Cannabusiness

Marketability

Your website’s entire purpose is driving business. Even if you have a good eye for style, don’t underestimate the power of a skilled marketer’s touch. Web designers with a strong marketing background know how to select the color schemes, imagery, wording, layouts, and even fonts that will elicit the desired response in your soon-to-be clients.

Streamlined, On-Brand Appearance

Everything about your website must accurately reflect your brand. If anything is off (even small details like inconsistent color schemes or mixed fonts) visitors will feel it, even if they don’t consciously realize why. Or, even worse, they’ll notice these inconsistencies outright, lowering your company’s professionalism and trustworthiness in their eyes. Skilled web designers have a trained eye for this consistency and can give your site an effortlessly streamlined, cohesive feel.

Functionality

Of course, even the most beautiful website will turn off visitors if it’s too slow or difficult to use. Well-built websites must be constructed on high-quality code that won’t constantly break, run nice and fast, and have a layout that feels easy and intuitive to navigate and use.

Legal Compliance

An in-depth understanding of the legal cannabis market and current laws and regulations surrounding cannabis, CBD, or ancillary marketing and commerce is critically important. Each country and state where cannabis is legal has its own highly-specific rules and regulations regarding imagery and wording disallowed in cannabis and CBD marketing.

For example, Canadian companies may only present factual information about cannabis products. Content that comes across as “promoting” cannabis use is forbidden. Organizations like the USA’s FTC (Federal Trade Commission) can and will fine cannabis and CBD websites discovered making legally disallowed claims. These fines can be steep enough to bankrupt a business, so the importance of compliance expertise cannot be overstated!

SEO Optimized

An attractive, well-organized website won’t do much for your business if no one ever sees it. People actively searching for your product or service are far more likely to come across your website if it’s SEO optimized. SEO-savvy web designers know how to use keywords and an array of other marketing and design techniques to drive relevant organic traffic to your site.

Poised for Growth

It’s always wise to leave room for future growth, expansion, or alterations. Whether you eventually add new product lines, open up additional dispensary locations, or decide to shift your business in an entirely new direction, your website must be capable of expanding and shifting right along with it.

Secure and Supported

Periodic updates are necessary and changes are inevitable. Website maintenance and ongoing support from someone who can handle these updates without breaking your site are essential. Additionally, familiarity with and application of current webpage security measures is crucial to keeping your website visitors and their personal data safe. This is especially important if your website has an online shopping cart.

Integratable Menu (for dispensaries)

All of the best dispensary websites include fully-integrated menus. Large dispensary aggregator sites can share your entire dispensary menu in an easily searchable format, which is certainly an attractive option. However, there is a degree of risk in sending your visitors offsite – particularly to a website that also shows off your local competitors’ offerings. Integrating your inventory system so your menu is showcased directly on your website can keep potential customers from leaving (and potentially getting distracted by your competitors’ menus!).

Mobile-Friendly

Since most internet browsing now takes place on smartphones, search engines focus on data from the mobile versions of websites to determine page ranking. For both of these reasons, a mobile-friendly website is critically important. Your website should look and feel similarly when viewed on any device – mobile, tablet, or desktop. It’s worth noting that investing in the development of your website’s mobile version is typically far less expensive than building an entirely separate app for ease of mobile use.

Who Should Hire a Professional Cannabis Web Designer?

Nearly any cannabusiness can benefit from investing in a high-quality website – including dispensaries, delivery services, cultivators, manufacturers, processors, distributors, testing labs, medical marijuana clinics, cannabis cafes and lounges, smoke shops, and all types of ancillary businesses (including dispensary security firms, cannabis business insurers, payment processors, product packaging designers, and many others).

What to Know Before You Get Started

Before you arrive at an initial cannabis web design consultation appointment, knowing precisely what your website goals and stylistic preferences are is essential. To ensure your finalized website matches your vision, here are the bases to cover in a web design consultation:

Your Audience and Goals

Everything about your website must cater to the needs and desires of your target market. But you can’t effectively market to them if you haven’t defined who they are! Are you targeting people who identify with cannabis primarily as a healthcare product? As a luxury good? As a groovy social lubricant for parties? Likewise, ancillary businesses must present their services in a way that conveys not only professionalism and trustworthiness, but true expertise in and care for the cannabis industry.

The Look and Feel You Want

Do some research before meeting with a cannabis web design firm, and find samples of website layouts and styles you like. Because a web designer’s interpretation of terms like “sleek,” “fun,” or “minimalist” may not align with your own, having solid reference points can be immensely helpful in planning the website of your dreams.

Established Branding

Unless your website will be built by a marketing team tasked with creating your company’s branding from the ground up, plan on showing up with your established brand assets at the ready. Consistency in everything from color palettes to fonts and logos goes a long way in creating an air of trustworthiness and quality, while avoiding that “thrown together” look.

Logo Design

At the very least, your logo can be a great stylistic starting point. Everything from font and color choices to the types of shapes, textures, and supporting graphics used throughout your website can coordinate with and complement elements of your logo.

Photos

Having professionally-shot photos of your products, staff, farm, facility, etc. ready at the start of website production is also wise. When it comes to photos, aim for quality over quantity. Give your cannabis web designer plenty of images to work with, but understand that a smaller number of high-quality images is nearly always better than an enormous folder of amateurish shots.

Trust in the Experts

Don’t forget why you’re hiring a cannabis web design expert in the first place. Be prepared to listen to the designer’s advice and suggestions. Business owners may have stylistic visions or organization ideas that simply won’t translate well to a real-life website. While your web designer’s goal is bringing your unique vision to life, there are limits on what can feasibly (and affordably) be built into a website. A good cannabis website designer will be honest about limitations and suggest alternate ways to achieve your goals and ideas.

Cannabis Web Design Options

All it takes is a simple Google search to realize that cannabis and CBD website building options are near endless. From big-name DIY platforms and cannabis industry-specific marketing firms to freelancers of varying quality on every gigging site, which option will provide the best return on your investment?

• Web Design and Marketing Firms: High-end large and mid-size cannabis web design and marketing firms bring considerable experience and expertise to the table, with extensive portfolios backing them up. With a larger team on deck, good web design firms are capable of delivering beautiful results in a timely fashion, and they often provide ongoing support for bug fixes or future upgrades. Full-service marketing firms can handle every aspect of your branding from the ground up, while web design-specific firms focus on creating around your existing branding.

High-end cannabis web designers may be pricier than hiring a freelancer or attempting to build a website yourself. But a quality website is worth as much as you can afford. Your website serves as the first impression of your company, products, or services to potential buyers, clients, or business partners. A dysfunctional, cheap-looking website may, at worst, scare off potential customers or investors and, at the very least, subconsciously damage your credibility in their eyes.

• Freelance Web Designers: Cannabis web design freelancers offer the opportunity to custom-build a website from the ground up, often at lower rates than large web design firms. However, when hiring a freelance web designer, due diligence is a necessity. Without the backing of a large firm, the sole responsibility for your project lies with that single person, so look for someone with a solid track record of following through and delivering a quality product. Before any work on the project begins, always get a detailed contract, complete with deadlines and clearly itemized costs – and never, ever hire a freelancer without a verifiable portfolio.

While it is possible to find great web designers pitching their services on gigging websites, we strongly recommend sticking with web designers who, at the very least, have their own website to show as a solid sample of their work, and, again, can provide a verifiable portfolio.

• DIY Websites: It may be tempting to put together your website on a do-it-yourself platform like Wix or HubSpot, as they are relatively simple to use and allow you to build an entire site for little to no cost. Unfortunately, the cons typically outweigh the low cost in the end. Unless you have considerable web design and marketing expertise of your own, designing a DIY cannabis website that looks professional, high-end, and delivers a top-notch user experience can be much more difficult and nuanced than it appears. DIY website building software seldom offers significant technical or design assistance, ultimately leaving users to figure everything out themselves.

What to Look For in a Cannabis Web Designer

As the market for legal cannabis continues its rapid expansion, a myriad of website designers are jumping in, hoping to capitalize on this exciting new industry. With so many options, selecting a web designer to work with can be overwhelming. Make sure whoever you hire checks all of these boxes:

• Cannabis Industry Expertise – First and foremost, a cannabis or CBD web designer must have experience with and expertise surrounding the cannabis industry. Not only will your site be better if it’s backed by a solid understanding of your product and target market, but compliance with local and national cannabis marketing and commerce laws is essential to the safety and success of your business.


First and foremost, a cannabis or CBD web designer must have experience with and expertise surrounding the cannabis industry.

• Design and Marketing Expertise – Likewise, web design and marketing expertise are crucial for a well-designed, well-built website with excellent user experience and marketability in mind. Take a look through the design firm’s website and portfolio to see how you feel about the style, usability, and other details of their work.
• Care For Your Vision – If you’re already envisioning how you’d like your website to look and the feelings you want to evoke in your visitors, ensure your chosen designer “gets” your vision and will strive to create it for you. Don’t be afraid to consult multiple designers before signing on the dotted line. A website is a major component of branding and customer relationship buildiing, and a designer who can bring your company’s true style and mission to life is vital.
• Budget-Friendly – Web design services can vary widely in scope and cost. Don’t forget to factor website creation into your startup costs and consider how much you can continually budget for hosting and long term upkeep.


Web design services can vary widely in scope and cost.

• Timeline – The designer you work with must be capable of getting your website online when you need it. Ensure that any deadlines or other time-sensitive considerations are clearly outlined in your contract.
• Excellent Reputation and Portfolio – High-quality cannabis web designers will be proud to show off their work and their portfolios will speak for themselves. However, it’s always advisable to seek out references and reviews of any cannabis or CBD website designer you consider working with – to ensure their beautiful product is delivered by a team that’s punctual, easy to work with, and dedicated to bringing clients’ visions to life. To help you start your search, we’ve compiled a list of top-notch cannabis and CBD web designers that we like and recommend.

Our Recommended Cannabis Web Designers