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.’

I think this (obvious, but still easy to forget) aim to solve real problems in simple, effective ways is an important one. In the context of website design this means finding out what your visitors want, not what you assume they want or what your competitors offer, but what they actually want. Then once you know what your visitors want you can provide it in a simple, effective way and they’ll thank you for it.

A concrete example, I’m currently working with the manager of a Fox and Fiddle Pub to design and build a new website. The manager asked his customers what they wanted from the site and got a simple answer. Many of those customers were corporate visitors to nearby hotels, and what they wanted was easy access to a printable food menu, to help them cater meetings and events. Providing for that need is extremely easy, with a printable PDF menu on the site. But we would never have know that we needed that feature if we hadn’t asked the customers first.