Today the brand new Hogtown Consulting redesign of the Fox & Fiddle Pub website launched.

I’m very happy with the new design, as is the client most importantly. It’s clean yet attractive and supplies all the information the pub’s visitors need in an accessible way. You can read more about the site’s design in the Hogtown Portfolio.

We all know that Google is the best way to find what you need on the web (or at least 56.9% of of us do according to the search stats) but simple search isn’t all that Google can do for you. Despite it’s simple exterior Google hides some powerful features, here’s one of them:
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The era of Internet communications opens up huge possibilities for small businesses that just didn’t exist in the pre-Internet days. Now, with clever use of the Internet, a tiny company can compete with the big boys without needing the money to hire a national sales team, buy high street stores or pay for billboard ads.

That’s all great, but, and it’s a big one, your potential customers know this too. They know that anyone with a little bit of time and money can make a website advertising their services. Those potential customers also know that a website does not a reliable business make, that there needs to be someone behind the website that they can do business with. This all comes down to credibility, and how specific signals given off by a website can either bolster or undermine your credibility as a business.
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This post is inspired by a blog post Less as a competitive advantage over at 37 Signals, a small but successful web application company. I use their basecamp product for project managing Hogtown work and like it a lot.

Their post is largely about how ‘less is more’ can be applied to software development, but I think there are some useful lessons here for web development. I particularly like the idea that ‘There’s already too much “moreâ€? — what we need are simple solutions to simple, common problems, not huger solutions to huger problems.’
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