Simplicity continues to matter greatly in website and mobile phone application design. People make split second judgments when they land on a site. They experience it first as a single "gestalt" view i.e. they see one whole picture in itself before any processing of individual elements takes place. Too many elements without any obvious design hierarchy and many people simply won't give it the time before bouncing off again. The conundrum for website designers is different segments of their site's visitors may need different messages, plus there are often conflicts between different revenue streams. For example homepage advertising often seems like easy money but confuses the main message of a website. There is also the constant drive to limit the number of clicks a visitor needs to get anywhere else within a site. Extra clicks usually mean lower conversion rates.

What's interesting is that simplicity is contextual - it can change over time and is based on design norms elsewhere in the digital media world.

Template based software, or at least solutions with a wide variety of available plug ins such as Drupal, Magento and Elgg, can help deliver this simplicity. You want a stand out design but you also want intuitive site navigation, which means it has to be based on people's expectations built from using other high traffic websites or mobile applications. A customisable ecommerce solution like Magento or a customisable publishing solution like Drupal can save you time and frustration on reinventing the wheel. It is genuinely hard to solve the design puzzle of how to present all the required design elements such as brand logo, navigation menu, advertising inventory, body text, H1 tags, disclaimers and key visuals. And to implement all the moving parts so it actually works.

Fortunately in today's web environment of constant measurement and optimisation you can rest assured that you are going to get immediate feedback on what is and isn't working with your design. So all is not lost if you don't get it right first time - simple or not. The key is to work with an experienced team of digital developers who can use existing web publishing solutions in a way which gives you the benefits of flexibility and development speed whilst delivering you something that comes across with a unique sense of character. Simple is good but simple and memorable is even better.

Oh and of course what really matters is that you are 100% clear on what the purpose of your website or application is. It's not as simple as it sounds. Good luck!