To follow on from my “Getting Clients Involved In Less”:http://www.onedegree.ca/2005/12/08/getting-clients-involved-in-less post, I thought I’d share what I’ve done with my corporate site at “schafer.com”:http://www.schafer.com/.
My site has gone through many changes in the just under 10 years I’ve been running it (the site will be into double digits in January). It shrinks and expands in direct proportion to the clarity I have around what I’m offering my clients.
Usually when I introduce a new service or change what I’m doing, I end up adding more to the site to make sure people understand the new stuff we’re offering. But after a while I realize that most of what I was saying didn’t really matter and could be done away with. Then the site starts to shrink again.
A few weeks ago I launched a new version of the site – probably the sparest iteration since our “hello world” page a decade ago. It’s four pages long. The logo is the only image on the site. Nothing dynamic, web 2.0, Flash-enabled, or even particularly exciting.
Category: Web Sites
There is a growing movement towards “less design and more constraints” in designing for the web – much of it sparked by “Jason Fried of 37 Signals”:http://www.37signals.com/svn/archives2/less_as_a_competitive_advantage_my_10_minutes_at_web_20.php.
At last month’s “Torcamp”:http://www.onedegree.ca/2005/11/28/torcamp-rocks-in-to I had an interesting conversation with “Jon Lax”:http://www.onedegree.ca/2005/10/06/five-questions-for-jon-lax-teehan-lax about this concept and how the biggest problem facing companies that want to adopt “less” as a design sensibility is client buy-in.
Clients typically want _more_ not _less_. When you’re paying for something the first reaction is that more is always better, but of course that isn’t the case.
“Squidoo”:http://www.squidoo.com is now live in beta and is definitely worth checking out. They may have my favourite home page right now (see above). How’s _that_ for minimalism!
I was one of the alpha testers for the site and did what I think many people will do – I built an “About Ken Schafer”:http://www.squidoo.com/kenschafer/ Lens (Squidoo’s term for a web page). Actually, I don’t mean that everyone will make a page about Ken Schafer, I mean lots of people will build lenses about themselves – just in case you thought my ego was completely unchecked.
Earlier today Heath Row of Squidoo sent this e-mail to all the alpha testers: