The World's Most Perfectly Suited Web Site
I was on the SitePoint forums where I saw a discussion about Warren Buffet's company web site.It is the simplest web site you'll ever see.
It's perfectly suited to his brand and how he is perceived.
His brand is so strong that his web site style simply makes no difference to his bottom line.
His is about the only business that I can think of like this.
The point is: your web site has to reflect your brand. It has to reflect the expectations your market has.
Brendon
[ comments ]
Many designers completely miss the balance between form and function. When you own a web site that real people go to, you can look at the stats and run split tests. It doesn't take long to see how minor things can make dramatic differences in what your users do & how much money your site makes. For a designer who can't see those numbers, its like driving a car blind.
If you were to drive blind, simplicity wins hands down. No matter how much testing and optimizing you do, the pretty glitzy web sites will nearly always underperform the simple, straight forward stuff. Thats a hard concept for many designers to digest, but when they do, thats when million dollar websites happen (without requiring millions more in venture capital.)