Brainstorming ideas for one’s own website may not be a conventional solution for every business, but it gave us some interesting insights, and might have some interesting points for you as well.
We categorized our users into three groups:
- Clients, investigating who we are and what we do.
- Professionals, looking for available jobs.
- Readers of our blog, including interested professionals, analysts and though leaders.
As you can imagine, both clients and professionals are likely to view similar pages, but will probably end their journey on different pages. With limited time to gain proper insight analysis on the usage of the website, we briefly looked at our top visited pages: about, blog, projects, people and jobs.
The proposed elements to be included in the home page were:
- Logo and payoff
- Menu
- Search box
- A big launch image
- About text
- Blog launch box
- Tag cloud box
- Presentations / events box
- Case studies / projects
If you want to try this week’s example, do your design now (no more than 10 minutes, remember) and then continue reading.
The proposals, as usual, shared some similar solutions:
- The menus were consolidated into a more manageable structure, making them cleaner and easier to understand. Also, the most common solution started from building a horizontal menu at the top of the page, with various solutions for internal navigation.
- A visual way to convey the information about the company was a really successful suggestion, although that alone would have required work and management alignment.
- Everyone added a featured space, even though it wasn’t in the original list of elements.
- Interestingly, not all the proposed elements were included by everybody, “too much noise.”
- Project visibility was a prominent feature in all the proposals and was often accompanied by a visual representation.
- An area for events was always present, but optional. Some proposals included one or more flexible areas to import different kinds of content.
We discussed what we thought were the minimal set of elements necessary. The discussion was interesting with some people considering the logo, payoff and collapsed menu enough. The risk involved here would be giving the wrong perception of the company.
We also had different expectations regarding the number of updates that the website should have. Designing a home page which doesn’t update content is an issue, so the design choices here must be carefully considered. This applies to any website which puts value in ‘news effect’ of its content.