Creating a marketing website is a lot like creating a theatre with scenery.
A western theatre with scenery is constructed so that every aspect implies and leads the audience towards suspending their disbelief and joining the cast in the world of the play. Certain elements - the box office, the programs, the seating and proscenium arch - are all expected elements that indicate "theatre" to a Western audience. Scenery, costumes and lighting all give the trained audience clues as to what world they will be visiting today. It's all selling the idea of the show to the viewers.
However, if you were doing theatre for a small tribe in an undeveloped country, where performance tended towards ritual and shamanistic practices, the "theatre" and "scenery" you would use might be quite different. To sell the show to this group, you'd have to alter the entire environment to suit their expectations.
When you're browsing the web, there are also clues you can find in the design that tell you instantly both the goal of the site and the target audience. Looking at the link I included above, there's an obvious difference between the one for the pizzeria at the top, the one with the watch in the middle, and the one at the bottom for Dreamworks. They all have similar elements, and they're all marketing something, but you know immediately from looking at them who they're trying to reach and the atmosphere they wish to convey. If you took all the text away from each of those sites you'd still be in the company's world.
The pizzeria uses warm tones and a layout that reminds you of a restaurant menu. The one with the watch uses neutral greys with a tiny poof of color to imply business and technology, and the bareness echoes the design of the watch itself. The one for the movie uses a bright color palette and a very busy screen to appeal to kids and capture the "zany" aspect of the cartoon.
In the case of a stage manager marketing website, who is your audience? PMs and Directors? What color palette clearly implies technical theatre to them? What images and layout will help to emphasize that you speak their language and can work with them? What would invite them into your stage management experience? If your site had no text at all, would they be able to get your point?
Another case in point is SMNetwork itself. It's got a very sparse design that I've deliberately kept quite consistent over the past decade or so. That's because my target audience prefers order and predictability. The blue is the default theme that comes with our forum software, but keeping it on the default was a deliberate choice. When I created new features (BTDT and the Internship Survey) I had to re-create the that "look" on the new pages. Blue is nice and calm. The boxes and rows are old-fashioned but reassuringly consistent. It isn't too fancy - also deliberate. For new visitors, encountering this site with its 15+ years of archives and roster of professionals is daunting enough without having to navigate a snooty interface.
