Design according to what you need

Think of yourself as a client. A client that is looking for a cleaning company. You have to find the best cleaning company for your home or business. What do you do? If you have friends to ask, you might ask them. If you don’t have any, you’ll probably search the web.

Let’s go on searching the net step. You’ll go to Google, google it and find tons of companies, that’s for sure. Think that’s your scenario:

• You clicked on of them,
• Watched “brilliant” intro,
• Wowed by their ultra big logo,
• Lots of animations made you feel like you were in a carnival,
• Widgets made for their international customers made you think how thoughtful they are about their customers. Oh they also have the latest news section!
• Oh that site should be your home page, how cool is that!

Right? No. Most of these sites will steal your time with their ugly, non-organized structure & communication-less design. There are lots of information about everything except their job: cleaning.

right design + right content = result

If you have a web site that you market your company / service, here is a checklist for you:

• Know what you are doing and what you are trying to sell,
• Make a list of what your customers need, that’ll probably be your site map’s basics.
• Compare your list with your web site, if you have already checked your list. Does your web site have other elements besides what you need?
• Basic elements of a corporate site home page:
  • Logo
  • Menu (less than 6 items)
  • Headline (what do you do?)
  • Spots (briefs for important parts of your web site: services, products, more info, contact)
  • Footer (summarize your menu items, give your contact info again, put a link to go top/home)
• It’s not important to design fancy pages, it is all about clean presentation.
• If you want a feature that is not related with any of your services, just don’t do it.

When you give your users what they want, you will get good results.