Just last week we overhauled Osmek's homepage, and redesigned our logo. Here's a look at the old site compared to the new, and some thoughts on the choices we made.

New Design:

Old Design:

Gaining Clarity

The first thing we needed to remedy with our redesign was clarity of content. When we thought about what our homepage should accomplish, and really broke it down to it's simplest form, there's two questions that we wanted people to have answers to when they saw the site for the first time. "What is Osmek?" and "What does Osmek do?". As you can see, our old site says a lot, but somehow doesn't say much. It started as teaser page before we released the product, then we kept adding on to it after launch. What we ended up with is a lot of text. It's a turn off.

For the new design we wanted to find a way to relate a potentially complex idea quickly and easily. So we drew a picture. Even if you don't understand what Osmek does or exactly how it does it, you get the general idea almost immediately. You literally "get the picture."

Planting Seeds.

If you want people to remember your site - and come back - give them one thing they can understand that will peak their interest. This one thing should be central to what makes your site or service unique. This one thing doesn't have to make complete sense or be fully understandable. What it needs to do is plant a seed. The viewer may not be interested in you today, but perhaps someday they will be interested in something similar to you. Since you planted that seed there, the first thing they'll do is come back looking for you.

Stripping The Rest

After we got our seed in place, the very next thing we did was strip out everything that didn't work to answer the two questions above. No need for in depth descriptions of the service, or how exactly it works. Just a few more scattered seeds. With a little interest, those seeds will grow into motivation, and I think viewers will start to look for answers to their own questions, rather then be forced answers to questions we assume they have. They'll check out our user guide, and support sites, they'll ask questions, they'll sign up and figure it out.

You can compare the new osmek.com to the old site which we'll leave up for a bit at osmek.com/site-v1.

I'd love to hear your feedback in the comments!