There are a lot of designers that follows design trends without understanding the reasoning behind certain designs. These designers or marketing managers blindly follow and implement designs for the business they work, and end up with no gain, or even losses to the business online presence. Does this sound like your business?

Many designers don’t understand the engineering or the sales aspect of a business, so they impose their limited understanding of their business and manage resources poorly, and end up with no results.

While following design trends is good, and it works in majority of the cases, as the trends are usually based on statistics collected from millions of websites around the world, but it is of utmost importance to understand where the trends / statistics come from.

For business-to-business companies, or companies that depend on sales to other companies, following design trends blindly does not work. It is necessary for B2B companies — especially in the technology or the Oil & Gas sector — to present the product information clearly and concisely on the page.

I hear marketing managers saying that “people don’t want too much information now” or “we need call-to-action” philosophy to achieve their business goals. And, it ends up failing. The reason is because they don’t have the adequate knowledge to actually help the business succeed.

As someone with an engineering background that has made many purchases for Oil & Gas projects, I can say with certainty that if the website I am trying to purchase from has obscured information, I just go to the next Google search result to find the product I am looking for.

Designing a website and making decisions on the marketing by blindly following design trends don’t work. Design trends are good for consumer electronics, where the function of the product is easy-to-understand, but such design trends don’t work for B2B companies.