What are some good guidelines when designing website for telecom-business

Question

I know that this question might be tossed out, and I apologies for that, but here goes nothing:

I work at a small call center in Sweden as a IT-technician. Since we´re so small we cant afford to hire any designer, and so it´s up to my department to design something good looking.

The website we have at the moment is.. lacking, in lack of better words. It was designed by one of the technicians that was with the company from the start, and, needless to say, he is proud of his work.

So, my question to you is: what would be the best approach to change our current website into something good looking and user-friendly?

The most important points would be:

1. Structure; personally, I want a simple wireframed design with simple colours, similar to this: http://www.subtraction.com/, but that might not go with either the others at my department, or with the brand of the company itself.
2. Colours, this speaks for itself, I think.

Our current website is this: http://www.k2c.se/.

(If this is too over-arching to answer, then this is my question:

What principles, or guidelines, should I go for, considering the colour of our current 
logo and brand (Purple/white on black), when designing the website of my company (in the 
telecom-business)? Colours, structures, other (good looking) sites in the same business?

Answer 1

There are no real guidelines you should follow, only non-written rules. Being a good webdesigner takes years of reading, experimenting etc. So to give you "some guidelines" is really hard.

What you can do however is find a template on www.themeforest.net and alter it to your needs (really cheap, even with wordpress included which is leading in the free CMSbusiness). If you do not want to buy a template it is still good to look around there since there are pretty darn good designers on that website.

When you look at their designs notice this:

• Take a look at how they spaced things (mostly based on the 960 grid)
• Take a look at how they create depth with subtle gradients
• Take a look at how they focus on "call to action" which is the most important thing
• Take a look at the backend (how clean the code is)

Now on the other hand if you really want to learn some basics of webdesign, here is a start for you:

• http://www.webdesignfromscratch.com
• http://uxdesign.smashingmagazine.com/2008/01/31/10-principles-of-effective-web-design/
• http://coding.smashingmagazine.com/2011/01/12/guidelines-for-responsive-web-design/
• http://www.smashingmagazine.com/2009/04/07/15-essential-checks-before-launching-your-website/

Also learn about jQuery, just google best jquery plugins 2010 (or 2011) and last but not least, read, read read.

Hope this helps you :)