Ask HN: Why do startup company websites look better than corporate sites? | Hacker News Reader

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

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.

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.

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?

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.

Big corporations might have a big corporate slow-moving web site, but designers are sometimes set free on short-term ad campaigns. Like apple does. The big site doesn't change, but they incorporate cool html into it sometimes. http://lukedurrant.com/2011/08/apples-360-rotating-ipod-html...

Pretty much, yeah. As organizations become larger, they become more risk-averse, which means more meetings and more approvals. So a lot of the work done in big enterprises is just either getting agreement, or chasing down information.

they end up doing endless iterations of designs which mostly never end up in production, microsoft was done by paravelinc btw. Here's a real story of one of those big corps: http://dustincurtis.com/dear_american_airlines.html

Well, the great designers don't work at large companies (of course there are exceptions...). That said, a large corporation will also have hundreds, if not thousands, of intranet sites that are likely using the same resources. Some companies have a "web dev" group that handles all the internal and external sites. A lot of time is spent doing impact analysis, planning, and requirements gathering.

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.

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

\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).

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.

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?

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.

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

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).

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

Established, monolithic corporations do not.

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