When it comes to design and marketing, being able to explain and justify your decisions is a good thing. You shouldn’t be creating anything that just “looks nice”, and everything should have a purpose. At the end of the day, though, you’re not going to be able to explain things to your end user — they’ll need to be able to understand on their own.
This is something that Steve Jobs was famous for doing. Once in a meeting, where he was going to be shown an upcoming commercial that Apple was going to run, the staff wanted to explain what they were trying to do with the ad. Steve refused and just wanted to see it without context, because that’s how their users were going to see it.
For something like your website, users need to be able to understand how to use it without any instruction. You should be able to explain your design decisions to your boss or client, but the user is going to visit the site without any context and it needs to work for them.
Whatever you’re building, think of the state of the user that will be interacting with it and keep it as simple as possible.
