

Ask HN: Why do startup company websites look better than corporate sites? - virtualmachine


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ig1
Because corporate sites typically have to obey a wide range of laws
(accessibility, compliance, etc), support a wide range of browsers (ie6),
support multiple languages, and meet corporate design guidelines (which cover
a wide range of material including printed brochures, tv adverts, etc).

They also tend to be redesigned every 3-7 years because they're huge
multimillion dollar projects due to their size and complexity, hence they
can't just follow current fads. They need to follow a design which will still
be approriate in a decades time.

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outericky
Corporate sites are a huge mess of distributed code and it takes months and
months to get approvals, and hundreds of thousands of dollars of inter-
departmental white dollars to make anything happen.

Startups just do it. And are able to use whatever tools/people necessary to
make it happen.

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danso
So a question I've had is, what do designers do at corporate companies (this
includes sites of very large tech companies, such as Microsoft.com, etc.),
given that there is so little that is quickly changeable? Do they have endless
design projects where nothing is actually done except having meetings? Or what
kind of iterations do they work on that may not be noticeable by the casual to
moderate user?

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xauronx
Pretty much. I work for a pretty large software consulting firm and there are
hours of meetings about simple design decisions. These are decisions that a
recent grad out of university could make in about 10 seconds and make
correctly. We have a team of designers that we work with that appear to have
stopped using the web in about 2000, and their designs and work show it.
However, they're somehow associated with the company and so continue to get
the work despite the subpar work. Corporate BS basically.

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acesubido
IMO design is not even the issue, it's the content/data. The more information
you are trying to convey without thought and modularity, the harder and more
complex it is to visualize that data.

Usual corporate sites want to tell everything about themselves. That's why
they opt to display it in such fashion: long prose that don't make sense.
That's why it subconsciously looks 'ugly' because you don't even know what
you're looking at. The content of corporate websites aren't intended for
capturing people, majority of corporate websites are intended to inform -
think of it like a company brochure.

Decision makers that want this "web presence" are 1) not educated enough to
realize the difference between print and digital media, and 2) not educated
enough about the cost of web development. That's why corporate websites can be
likened to a huge company brochure that doesn't make sense when translated
into the web. To top it off with the already mentioned comments about
"approvals", instead of working with designers to make sure the website looks
highly presentable and understandable, designers are constantly overridden
with the 'preferences' of these decision makers.

In a startup, things are different. People work closely together to bring the
organization into a higher level. The key decision makers know that they only
serve as a visionary to a team of people, and they know they have to work
closely with highly talented people in order to bring the organization to
life. This setup results into a deeper level of communication that allows the
designers and decision-makers to move as one into knowing what content to
write and how the website is designed around that content in order for the
readers to flow through the website.

The prose on the website turns out to be cleaner, and much clearer. One goal,
one message. Pages meant to inform and pages meant to capture visitors are
segregated appropriately, visitors get captured and get informed. The "look
better" part is just a byproduct of that kind of unity found in a start-up, it
isn't even a critical goal.

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meowface
You're right, but design can make some pretty big differences. It can make
people more interested in your product and your company, and increase the
chance they'll actually read the content you're trying to display.

As an example, navigate through a bunch of the pages of Square's main website:
<https://squareup.com>

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smartician
\Design by Committee, sometimes even Design by A/B Test vs. the singular
"vision" of a startup website. Several stakeholders compete for the real
estate on the site, which gets cluttered quickly. Legal departments demanding
disclaimers and trademark symbols galore. A desire to develop a unique style
vs. just using Twitter Bootstrap plus a Lobster font logo (okay, that last one
was a bit tongue-in-cheek).

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pixelmade
Corporate sites usually have rigid branding guidelines that define the message
and imaging the site should convey. Startup sites usually have much looser
guidelines. It's a lot easier to design something awesome when you're not as
constrained.

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penland
Another big issue not addressed here is the reluctance by project owners to
completely turn over design. In the enterprise, the outlays for development
are typically covered by another department, and in most cases that's
marketing.

So if marketing is paying the bills for the website, they are going to get
final say on what the website looks like. After all, they design the
commercials, they write the radio ads and come up with the campaigns, why
shouldn't they be designing the website to seamlessly integrate the current
add campaign into the website?

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grumps
There's a multitude of factors all of which I encounter in the agency space on
a daily basis:

1\. Organizational intelligence and outlook on the web.

2\. Who owns the site(s) IT vs Marketing and whom is a stakeholder.

3\. Budgets.

4\. Who builds it...outside thinking can produce great things but are often
hindered significantly by 1-3.

1 & 2 are the biggest factors.

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neilk
Conway's Law: "organizations which design systems ... are constrained to
produce designs which are copies of the communication structures of these
organizations."

<http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Conway%27s_law>

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mapster
lots of fuddy duds (i.e., high salaried decision makers) get their fingers
into the website design process, CCing staff lawyers etc. Which doesn't mean
the result is garbage - it can really reflect the company (highly technical,
arcane, complex, professional, etc.), which may be effective if that speaks to
their clients/customers (also fuddy duds).

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svenkatesh
Startups need to care more about appearance, because they operate on
perceptions.

Established, monolithic corporations do not.

