Design website for "Excel Meets Facebook" web application

AB Solutions (code name)

AB Solutions (ABS) is a start-up that offers SAAS financial services applications to start-ups and mid-sized businesses. ABS provides powerful applications that are easy to use and allow financial managers to spend their time developing insights rather than wading through data details and crunching numbers. The first application in the ABS application suite is a collaborative financial management tool called AB Product (ABP).

AB Product is best described as “Excel meets Facebook”. ABP is a next generation spreadsheet that instantly provides accurate and up to date information while allowing financial managers to share and distribute the information to stakeholders in their professional network.

This contest is to design the home page, the registration page and the product information page of the ABS website. The home page is the most critical and should set the design tone for the additional pages. (Less effort should be spent on the registration and product information pages.) Since only the ABP application will be available to start, the ABS website design should focus on ABP yet be extensible as additional applications are brought online.

Follow on work may be available on design extensions.

The ABP application is B2B and our customers are CEOs of early stage start-ups, CFOs/Controllers of medium-sized businesses, investors in early stage start-ups, and attorneys who advise such companies. The website should “speak” to these people in a pleasant and professional, not stuffy, manner.

ABP offers several key benefits for our target audience, as follows. Each of these messages should be incorporated into the message banner on the home page. Further, each message should be given a single box on the home page for further explanation.

Messages:
• Easy to manage: “Keep your financials accurate and up to date, at all times.”
• Take control, understand, real time: “Spend your time distilling insights, not crunching data.”
• Secure: “Rest assured your encrypted data cannot be hacked.”
• Power of collaboration: “Securely share your financials with your network of stakeholders.”

We are looking to create a site that:
• Has a clean, professional, progressive, easy-to-use and trusted look.
• Informs and enables sign-up for ABP without seeming “sale-sy”.
• Can be extended as additional ABS applications come online.
• Unifies the site pages with the ABP application.

The design of the site should:
• Have a modern aesthetic that connotes a cool, urbane, clear-cut and functional experience. (By way of example, our team likes the subtle background grid, clean appearance and sparing use of color on this site: http://www.codesion.com.)
• Evoke adjectives such as “rational, intellectual, progressive, exact, lively, open, friendly and healthy”.
• Echo the attached application colors (or refine them to your liking as the application colors are not yet final). Presently the colors in use are grey (#F7F7F7 to #B6B5B5), white, varying shades of yellow (#EEE7CB to #FDEDAD to #FBCB57), and sapphire blue (#BBCFEB to #779ED5). The more vivid colors should be used to call attention to key site actions.
• Appeal to our audience without feeling like a consumer site (too casual or frivolous) or an enterprise site (too stuffy). (For example, incorporating graphics rather than clip art images of smiling professionals would be our preference.)

[Requirements and remainder of creative brief continued in the attached PDF.]