Like a masochistic fool I designed and built the website for Articulate Marketing when I should have got someone else to do it for me or used an open-source CMS like Joomla.

However the fun bit of the process was reviewing websites belonging to professional services firms that I admire. Here’s a partial list with my observations.

• Wolff Olins. I liked the big, bold photography and the clear mission statement on the home page. However, I felt there was too much vertical scrolling, too much wasted space and little sense of the company being populated by human beings (it’s a big firm but we don’t see the people on the site).
• McKinsey. Unlike most sites, they manage to use the width of the page properly. I like this a lot because many sites have a weird vertical letterbox which has little relationship to the aspect ratio of most people’s screens. Again the use of photography is good if slightly gratuitous. However, there seemed to be too many menus and they felt a little confusing. It needs a little more information architecture as seen from the visitors perspective because it still feels a little solipsistic right now.
• Norman Neilsen Group. My guru, Jakob Neilsen, works here. The site is a little bit hand-crafted - things jump around from page to page, for example - but it is a tidy site with a good two tier navigation structure and it loads very quickly. I like this site a lot. It lacks a search tool and it is ever so slightly dry and text-heavy. They have great pictures of their people but one or two pictures on the home page wouldn’t go amiss, perhaps the founders or something.
• Xplane (not to be confused with Austin Meyer’s X-plane - the one-man flight simulator guru). This site takes you neatly to their case studies page. They obviously reckon that this is the best way to explain what they do. I think they’ve missed a trick here because what they do is create graphical representations of business processes and it is surprising that the first thing you see on their site ISN’T one of their own diagrams explaining what they do. However, the case studies are well presented with good logos, microcontent descriptions and they do a good job also of identifying which types of companies they like to work with (i.e. BIG ones). The design is just a little fussy and objects a placed on the page slightly randomly but I respect their sidebar and menu system. It’s like NNGroup but with more graphics and case studies.

Other sites I like: www.griffintechnology.com, www.kk.org, www.davidlinley.com.

What I picked out from these sites that I tried to incorporate into Articulate is:

• Use the whole width of the page.
• Make a site that reformats if you change the size of the text or the shape of the window.
• Have really simple menus - avoid drop-down, Windows-style menus if possible.
• Use big font sizes and fewer words.
• Pictures are good if they help make the point and don’t slow the download.
• Should make the ‘contact us’ or call to action very prominent and easy to find. This is why I put our phone number and email address on the top right hand of every page.
• Good use of case studies, with microcontent and logos is very powerful and persuasive. We have good clients such as Microsoft and the British Government so making them visible builds credibility.
• It’s vital to see the website from the customer’s perspective not the company’s. Outside-in, not inside-out.
• We should eat our own dog food. In other words, Articulate is a writing business. The site should be well-written and properly edited like all our work.

I think the result isn’t bad for a new site but I’d welcome constructive feedback.