New Home and Product Pages!
At Balsamiq, we fully embrace Kaizen, continuous improvement. We change, grow and improve all the time. Most of these changes happen behind the scenes, and since we're caught up in the day-to-day improvements, they don't seem that noticeable. Once in a while though, it makes sense to take a step back and look at our own website: does it reflect who we are now and where we want to go, or who we were a few years ago when we did the last website redesign? It's similar to barely noticing your own child growing day after day versus the shock you feel when you see how much your distant cousin's daughter has grown since last year. 😊
I had one such moment earlier this year: I realized that Balsamiq had grown way past what we were showing on our home page.
These days, Balsamiq has four main core offerings, which we call "pillars" internally:
- We started with our product, Balsamiq Wireframes. This is what we're most famous for, and clearly our main core competency.
- But we're also pretty famous and well-respected as a company: somehow our genuine, down-to-earth attitude resonates with people, maybe because of the contrast with the tech giants that are in the news all the time.
- In the last few years, we've also invested quite heavily in giving back to our community: on top of our huge $350,000 yearly sponsorship budget, we continue to give out free software day after day, and have staff whose whole job is to give back to people who are also trying to rid the world of bad software.
- Last but not least, we've started a big effort in teaching people how to wireframe properly. Our product is just a tool, like a pencil. Owning a pencil doesn't mean you'll sketch like Leonardo DaVinci...you need education as well. Our goal for our learning site is to become the best site on the web for beginner UX designers.
Our vision right now is for each of these pillars to be as important as the others: we want each to be so good that we become known for each of them equally.
In other words, they're what we're all about, at least in this phase of our company's never-ending growth.
Unfortunately, our website did not reflect this, at all. It was time to change.
We've been moving things around for a bit, but this week we finally surfaced the four pillars in the top-level navigation of our website, and in the footer. We also cleaned up our home page dramatically, to be much less about the product and instead highlight our four core offerings.
Check out our new homepage here: https://balsamiq.com
A new product page
Together with the home page, we decided to revamp our product page (https://balsamiq.com/wireframes/) to include what we've learned in so many years of talking to our customers.
We use wording that comes straight from customer interviews, we clearly highlight who we're serving, and we generally modernized our look and feel a bit.
Our work is not done. In fact, it's never done! 😊
We hope you like this little step. We're no landing-page copywriting experts, but we're trying our best. Let us know what you think in the comments, if you have advice on how to improve these two new pages, we're all ears!
Onward!
Peldi for the Balsamiq Team
