Most corporate websites look very similar at the moment.
Company logo on top with a quick menu, large graphic with the companies latest marketing campaign or product. Beneath that there are normally three columns with links to all the other information that you might want to find on the site followed by some quick links in a block of colour at the bottom of the page. There’s a number of reasons that most corporate websites have all drifted in this same direction.
The first is that everyone else is doing it. If everyone has their website structured like a newspaper classifieds page, then there is familiarity for the user. Which makes for a safe bet for not terrible user experience. Particularly if you’re a bank or an insurance company the primary purpose of your website is utilitarian. People aren’t logging onto Commonwealth Bank’s website, for instance, to just browse around. They are there with a goal in mind.
The Second reason is that having this safe word press template makes it easy to add and remove content from a website without having to worry about where the content is going to be put or how it is going to affect the entire flow of the website. If you’ve hired a new Finance Manager, it goes in the news section and you change the smiling picture of the finance manager in the “Meet the team” section. No one is confused, the whole website doesn’t need to be redesigned and it only takes a couple of hours work from a single Developer to finish.
So what’s the problem with the corporate internet looking like the notice board at the local tennis club? Nothing really, these sites have a purpose and they achieve that purpose well. There’s still the rest of the wonderful internet to discover with gems like www.gophergripes.com or www.geocities.ws/seizure_robot that have literally zero purposes. But it is boring.
So, I wanted to call attention to a few corporate websites that while not reinventing the wheel, do have some more interesting front end development, where they play with colour, distance and depth to make the browsing experience a bit more enjoyable. Let’s face it, if you’re looking for something specific on your site, you can always have a search bar or a site map. Problem solved.
Rocketboots – Why is it not scrolling down?
Integrity Life – Everything fits together in the same theme. I like the way they change the number of scrolls it takes to get through each section
Arq Group – Still follows the top to bottom format but doesn’t dump all the information possible on one page. Everything is clear clean and simple.