Proof before pitch

The Brief

A shared services provider in Sri Lanka, selling finance, human resources and project management functions to corporate clients, with no site that reflected what the business had become.

The scope was a single landing page. No inner pages, no case studies, no careers portal. Whatever the design did, it had to do it in one scroll.

Research

Before any visual work, I ran a competitor audit across local providers and a wider set of international outsourcing firms. The pattern was flat: a services grid, a photograph of a meeting room, a form. The category has a house style and almost everyone in it was wearing it.

The more useful finding came from reading how the international firms sequenced their pages rather than how they looked. The ones that read as safest to buy from did not lead with what they do. They led with accreditations, client counts, years in operation and employer awards, and put the service list underneath.

That reframed the brief. An outsourcing decision is a risk decision. The buyer is not asking whether the provider can run a payroll, because everyone in the category can. They are asking whether the provider will still be running it well after the people who sold it have moved on. Nothing on a services page speaks to that. Accreditation, tenure and employer reputation do.

Design Process

The page keeps the category’s familiar sequence: hero, who we are, services, then proof. The research pointed the other way, and the page shipped conventional. What the design could still change was how far a reader has to travel to reach the evidence, and that is where the work went.

Two things do that job. The Great Place To Work mark sits inside the hero rather than in a trust-badge strip near the footer, so the first thing a visitor sees alongside the positioning line is a third party vouching for the company as an employer. And a jump bar sits directly under the hero naming the five destinations on the page, Achievements among them. A reader whose question is proof gets there in one click instead of four screens.

Lower down, the certificate wall and the awards timeline were combined into a single section rather than split. A grid of marks tells you the company is accredited. A dated list of awards running 2021, 2022, 2023 tells you it still is. Separated, each is half an argument.

The visual treatment was kept deliberately quiet. This category rewards looking established over looking interesting, and it is one of the few briefs where I think the conservative read is the correct one.

The engagement ended at design handoff and the site was not built.

Key Decisions

Putting the employer accreditation in the hero was the decision I would defend hardest. It looks like a small placement choice and it is the whole argument of the page in miniature: for a buyer assessing whether to hand over a department, how the provider treats its own staff is evidence about turnover, and turnover is the thing that will actually determine whether the service holds up in year three. A services paragraph cannot make that point. A certification mark from someone else can.

The jump bar was the second. In-page navigation on a single landing page is usually redundant, and I would normally argue against it. Here it earns its place, because the page’s proof is structurally in the wrong half and the bar is what makes that survivable for a reader who does not have the patience to scroll to it.

What I’d Do Differently

All client feedback came to me secondhand, filtered through the agency. I received interpretations of what the client said, not the client’s actual words. That makes it genuinely difficult to understand whether a direction change reflects a real concern or a misreading of the brief.

This was the arrangement on every project I did through that agency in 2024, and it is the single constraint I would change about all of them. If I were doing this again I would push to be in the room at the brief stage and at first presentation. On a page whose entire argument is about what one specific kind of buyer finds credible, secondhand is the worst possible way to learn what that buyer is like.

The jump bar is also a workaround, and I should name it as one. The right fix was to move the proof up the page, not to add navigation that helps people skip to it. I designed around a structure instead of changing it, and a bar that helps a reader escape your section order is evidence the section order is wrong.