Slashdot Mirror
The Surprising Truth About Ugly Websites
nywanna writes "After seeing the example of Plenty of Fish and the reports of the site earning over $10,000/day in Adsense revenues, I quickly realized that there are a lot of ugly websites that are extremely successful. The reason for this, according to the article, is that ugly websites do a few things that beautiful websites tend to lack."
Maybe that's why slashdot is so successful?
The old ICQ website still tops my ugly list. It had multiple columns and went on forever. Info overload.
/.-ed already, now that is what I call UGLY!
Could not connect: User root has already more than 'max_user_connections' active connections
Support NYCountryLawyer RIAA vs People
...with poor layout, non-compliance, and shabby editorial standards.
Obviously... I mean Slashdot seems to do OK.
FP?
Could not connect: User root has already more than 'max_user_connections' active connections
it certainly will today.
Sort of a self-fulfilling prophecy, putting a website onto slashdot and then noting how successful it is.
This web page is truly ugly. It consists of a boring white background with a single line of boring black text, saying "Could not connect: User root has already more than 'max_user_connections' active connections" :-)
The Tao of math: The numbers you can count are not the real numbers.
I'm sure that an ugly porn site would probably bring in more money than a pretty site about overpriced potato chips that you can ship from Pakistan.
Earn a % of cash back from Newegg, Tiger Direct, Walmart.com, and more: http://www.mrrebates.com?refid=458505
Example #1: Slashdot itself.
... and when one of those websites that is usually ugly but full of features becomes beautiful, they are even more successful. Google, for example.
Flipping through the various examples in The Zen of CSS Design , for example, I am amazed by how gorgeous some of the effects are, but I know that I'd be quickly worn out if I had to use any of these on a regular basis. Sometimes simple design, even to the point of blocky quasi-socialist-realist functionality, works better even if it doesn't win awards for looks.
ugly websites do a few things that beautiful websites tend to (not do).
Ugly women often have the same virtue.
Cloned foods give the statement "We had that last week!" a whole new meaning.
http://www.mirrordot.org/stories/769705d9b08519a47 87a04a681da4700/index.html
Hampsterdance.
Hmm, I wish I knew this before I redesigned PriceAge. I think it's still an attractive site, but also has the usability/simplicty features mentioned in the article.
I read an article about a guy making tons of money on the internet shipping a certain product. When I checked out his webpage it looked so amatuer that I would have never bought from him. I guess the people that don't mind ugly sites are the same ones that fall for the spam links all the time. One thing is for sure: "Attractive site != income potential". There are just too many ugly sites that buck that idea.
Most sites are useless unless they have some form of content or purpose that is of interest to its visitors. A good design may help on first impressions, but it's the content that makes you return. The extreme goes in both directions; too flashy or bleeding eyes contrast problems.
I generally do not visit many nice looking sites because there is too much garbage on them and they are slow to load. Dont even get me going on sites with a big 800x600 flash movie on the home page...
Contrary to popular belief, Unix is user friendly. It just happens to be particular about who it makes friends with.
Put the snob in the backseat for a moment and consider there's a difference between Ugly and Simple. Back in the early days there was a site where I learned the fundamental difference between Form and Function, the bottom line is, as it always has been, Keep It Simple, Stupid.
My designs tend to have a very small footprint and require minimal bandwidth. While I was building light weight search engines, the clod who over-saw our website put a massive graphic on the home page. Those, like myself, still on 2400 baud modems at the time had to sit and wait for that The Bob damn thing to load.
Years later I was working with United Airlines Air Cargo and some brain at the top elected to replace a very simple, not pretty, but very simple interface with javascripts galore, whizzy graphics and image mapping, all in a kind of Black on Black, which would have Hotblack Desiato break out in a sweat, dead or not. It didn't work and they'd spent big on it.
This isn't really an ugly site. On the other hand /. ... hmm.
A feeling of having made the same mistake before: Deja Foobar
One good example not mentioned: Maddox's The Best Page in the Universe prides itself on a very simple design and he gets a gillion hits. Not to mention he only uses a subdomain of his ISP.
Sorry for the site going down - working on increasing max connections...
When many people come to an ugly page they click somewhere just to get away from it.
Personally I hit the back button, but I guess that's just me.
Developers: We can use your help.
Third page in the Digg review cue:
"The Surprising Truth About Ugly Websites
daoustmark submitted by daoustmark 57 minutes ago (via http://www.site-reference.com/...)
I wrote this article after seeing a couple of examples of ugly websites that were unbelievably successful, including one site that makes over $10,000/day in Adsense! I realized that there are qualities to ugly websites which help make them successful."
So is nywanna daoustmark? Or just copying other posts from digg?
It's simple, the uglier the web site, the more you will want to LEAVE. Even if it takes an ad-click, it gets the job done and you dont have to look at godawful fonts and horrible color choices any more. Part 3, as always, is *profit*. Brilliant if you ask me.
Pretty isn't a requirement for raking in money, case in point: Bill Gates.
I'm still waiting for the adsense, and thus google stock, crash. It will come. There are so many adsense scraper sites and the fact that every tom dick and harry can throw adsense on a page is not necessarily a good thing. I think google should be doing some quality screening, but I guess adwords advertisers don't really care.
Well now that there is a direct link to that website on Slashdot, I wouldn't be surprised if it jumped to $50,000 a day!
Nice work... encourage bad site design..
I am constantly suprised at the amount of traffic Craig gets with his horrific design. It's cluttered, the colors are lacking, and lacks any personality. It's just a big blob of links.
But then I remind myself that above all else, it's functional and has enough content to trump any bad design decisions. Content will always trump design. Even bad design.
-- Jim http://www.runfatboy.net/
Why do I have a feeling that this was all just an ad for plentyoffish.com? I mean, why not get a bunch of undersexed males to visit a page promising free matchmaking with plenty of pictures of cute women? The whole 'story' about ugly websites is really inconsequential. (And plentyoffish isn't all that ugly, IMHO.) I'm starting to get the feeling we've all fallen for this hook, line, and sinker.
The only thing I hate more than hypocrites are people who hate hypocrites.
http://www.amazon.com/
Butt ugly, horrible backends and still rolling in dough.
Your pizza just the way you ought to have it.
Ugliness has never looked better. I have spent the last few days examining a surprising trend in web design that has made ugly websites look absolutely irresistible. No, its not the bolded, 18 point Times New Roman font shouting at me as I access the page that has me excited, nor is it the harsh colors that have actually managed to make my eyes hurt and distort my vision. In fact, its not even that logo which is so pixelated from being processed, resized, saved, and edited so many times that it appears to be blurred to protect the identity of the company who owns the website that has me singing the praises of ugly websites. What is it?
Ugly sells.
That's right - ugly websites are surprisingly effective in making money. As a person who puts business before technology, a profitable website is a website is an unbelievably attractive website to me.
The Case of Plenty of Fish
I was struck by an example of just how effective ugly websites can be this past week as I was browsing through some web related news. I stumbled across the story of Plenty of Fish. This is a very plain looking website that offers a free online dating service much like Match.com (but without the subscription fee). There was nothing specifically impressive about the website that stood out to me, in fact the site was actually rather ugly.
What caused me (and I am sure several other people) to take a second look at the website was its reported earnings. It is reported that this website brings in over $10,000 from Adsense - in one day. Yes, you did read that correctly. For those of you counting, that is $300,000 per month and nearly one million dollars in just three months.
The example of Plenty of Fish lead me to consider how an ugly website could be so successful. As I looked around, I suddenly realized that this was not the only successful ugly website. Ebay is unbelievably ugly, Craigslist has never won an award for innovative design, and IMDB has never even bothered to format their text out of the default Times New Roman. What is it about ugly websites that makes them so successful?
The Ability to Convey Trust
A while back I wrote an article on Controlling Your Visitors Eyes. The main point to this article was that you have less than a second to convey your marketing message to your visitor, and that every aspect, from your font selection, to the colors, navigation, and layout of your website play a part in conveying your marketing message.
When I wrote this article, I had beautiful, CSS designed websites in mind. The idea of an ugly website could present a positive message never crossed my mind. Yet the fact is, ugly websites do have the ability to present the perfect marketing message. What is that message?
You can trust us. We are a family run business and do not employ a marketing team. Our website is simple, but functional. Most importantly, our goal is to serve our customers, not necessarily learn HTML.
As Internet professionals, we often forget that a large part of our society is actually afraid of the Internet. Although online shopping is growing, most people still have concerns about online security and the impersonal nature of the web. Most people do not know how to surf efficiently and use only the default tools that are given to them when they take their computer out of the box.
And this is one reason that ugly websites can sell. The lack of professionalism and a polished look leads one to believe that they are dealing with an individual. Websites cannot be trusted, but individuals can be trusted.
Function Over Form
Although the above theory holds true in many examples, I believe there is more to the success of ugly websites than just conveying trust. Many of the websites that I referenced above have one underlying trait that can be attributed to their success: they are extremely easy to use.
Google is probably the best example of how functionality over form can lead to success. When Google init
I'm just saying that, at first I thought when I saw that that ugliness was a good thing, but it has almost nothing to do with all that.
You just got troll'd!
I've seen plenty of "pretty" websites that are absolutely worthless. This only goes to show that aesthetic appeal is NOT the most important factor in website development. Function -- comprising primarily of layout, usability, accessibility, platform, type, etc -- is the CORE of a good website design. Also, don't forget about content!
It is almost like a pyramid with content and functionality being the foundation for a good website. On top of the pyramid is the "polish" or aesthetic design. I'm sure that we'll all agree that aesthetics and human computer interactions (usability, flow, etc -- the stuff that Apple is notorious for) are also very important.... but, like anything else, it is a blend of form AND functionality. What good is a website if it ONLY works on Opera? What good is a great UI if there is not functionality? You get the point.
Now what would be quite interesting is to apply these concepts to people! As we all know, looks aren't everything! But hey, that certain polish certainly makes a difference.
Matthew K. Wong http://www.themindoffmatthew.com
Their website must be *very* extremely successful, then.
Man, he doesn't come out and call Google ugly, but he implies it. He doesn't get it. It's really about the simplicity, rather than the aesthetics. Simple websites that provide people a real service *work*.
I remember working for a major shipping company and the marketers were just discovering the web. People used our website because they wanted to know where there packages were. *Now*. The marketroids were looking at ways to keep people glued to the site longer so they could sell them more services. We had to constantly battle to keep the tracking as simple as possible so that people could get on and get off quickly.
All ideas^H^H^H^H^Hprocesses in this post are Patent Pending. (as well as the process of patenting all postings)
Ugly as in "mauve character on fushia background, with 3 dozen generic animated GIFs you've seen 1 million times" or Ugly as in "Plain undecorated Arial with no graphics whatsoever" ?
I guess the truth is: That if you post an article on your web site to slashdot, your web site will serve up really ugly "Maximum connections exceeded" and "mysql server has gone away." messages!
I mostly agree with the article, but I'd rephrase it. This is not about "ugly sells" but rather about "simple sells." Having flashy pages simply distracts from the message. But having nicely formatted text can be nice. eBay or Google may be "ugly," but more accurately they're simple (although I sort of disagree about eBay). Google doesn't load up its page with tons of junk, as does Yahoo... and that's probably why I use Google.
One thing I really disagree with is the articles talk about trust, how people feel they can trust an ugly website more than a nice one. Here, personally, I think that if somebody can't afford nice webdesign, they can't afford good web security. That being said, this is where my rephrase comes in again - simple and clean design leads me to trust a site more than does flashy sites.
To be fair, the article does talk about simplicity a lot... I just feel that it points to ugliness instead of simplicity as the driving factor, and that's not quite correct. Simple sites may be ugly, but they don't have to be - and if they're not, simple and clean is better than simple and ugly.
-Daniel
is king ?
The one site in particular that sticks out in my mind has having particularly bad design is MySpace. Total information overload, poor organization of content, and horrible horrible backend code (servers are slow as molasses, and my sessions are frequently expired inexplicably).
I understand that it's a 'community' site, but I honestly don't feel a part of that at all. It's difficult to build a huge online community unless users can selectively segregate themselves into groups. This is part of the reason why Facebook and Flickr are both extremely successful.
Granted, there are ugly sites with truly great content that balances out the fact that the site's rather ugly. Likewise, there are a host of very pretty sites that are lacking in the content department.
Although I used to consider myself more of an content guy and the type of guy who uses the command line for most tasks, I find myself gravitating toward sites that although they may not offer as many features, are easier to use, and are visually appealing. Flickr is probably the best example of this. With CSS, there is no excuse to have a poorly designed site. CSS makes it ridiculously easy to propogate an attractive design across your entire site. If you already know basic HTML, you can pick up all the CSS you need to know in a few days. Likewise, CSS also means people can finally stop using Photoshop as a design tool.
With CSS, formerly ugly sites can make themselves pretty with very little effort. Slashdot went to great lengths with their stylesheet to make sure they preserved the old ugly layout.
-- If you try to fail and succeed, which have you done? - Uli's moose
I think there are some very good points here. I've always valued functionality over form and beauty. (I own ten year old cars, for example.)
But it's interesting to me that he defines success as making a lot of ad revenue. My websites do not exist to get me revenue. They exist to build communities. Somebody else might have yet another definition of success for his website. I think the general principles raised are true no matter what the purpose of your site is, but I find it interesting that some people don't see a point for their site other than "make a lot of money carrying Google ads." More power to them if they can ... it means they are providing something people want, financing it through advertizing, and making a bundle along the way. It's just not my purpose in having a website.
Secession is the right of all sentient beings.
Not yet released, but looks promising. Simple look, with css-zengarden like potential.
http://www.opendating.org/
http://www.plentyofsluts.com :)
by TheSpoom (715771) Uncaring Linux user here. I have nothing to add to this but please continue. *munches popcorn*
Its the content.
Slashdot ain't that pretty, honestly. But what draws people here is the content. PlentyOfFish is a dating service, that is free, and there are lots of people looking for love out there.
The quality of the website can't be judged by how good or bad it looks. Just like a book cover or people, beauty rarely is the sole reason something is ever successful or popular.
Some of the best looking websites out there don't get an audience because the content sucks or is irrelevant.
If you have a website that is making tonnes of money, why bother wasting any of it to glam it up?
I haven't thought of anything clever to put here, but then again most of you haven't either.
What's so ugly about that web page ? The colors are pleasing, the eye flows down the page, the content is easy to navigate. What did you want, a stupid Flash splash screen ?
My idea of an ugly web page is one with lots of dancing sausage, banner and other ads not only at the top but down the side, a web page where you just don't know what to look at, with an unpredictable mishmash of colors and unrelated content. I like a simple, fast loading web page better than some flash/javascript/rollover-magic animated slow-loading mess. Somehow I'm not shocked that a simple web page often does better than a complex one. The only people shocked to learn simple, organized groupings of information are more popular than some complex ones are graphic designers and such who are too impressed by their own tricks.
Form fitting function- that's beauty in design.
Would be...
www.Microsoft.com
I still can't understand why the are so succesfull...
-AC
daoustmark is nywanna (check email domains). So he posted the same story to two different tech blogs. So what?
My personal website is all divs and styles, without any images. Any website that strays too far from this is, to me, ugly (and looking at some of the posts, I guess others are of the same opinion), especially if it's linking to ads.
I know people who are jumping on Bandwagon 2.0 and insisting that all websites should be AJAXified (ugh), and must have flashy graphics and rounded corners, and if you don't do that then your page is all boring and ugly.
There are also art people who spend all the time making their page look nice and don't actually put their content first. Their page might not be ugly, but it's not usable either.
Then there are the people who think HTML is ugly and go with Flash. Bastards.
The point of this long post is that a page may be 'ugly' to you but 'nice' to someone else. To all those people citing Google or Maddox as examples, 'simple' != 'ugly' - you may like it, and it may not be too flashy, but there are plenty of simple and ugly websites out there. (Green text on green background anyone?)
Not to mention, that the people who spend more time offering services and writing content than caring about the design might actually have more of a clue of what they are doing.
Guy asked me for a quarter for a cup of coffee. So I bit him.
It looked clean and functional. It certainly wasn't "pretty", but it was far from "ugly".
Form follows function. If there isn't any requirement for cute effects, then why add them?
This monster for example
It's innevitable that this will happen. The question is whether or not the editors here will be smart enough to let the story through AFTER it's been posted to Digg or not. They should add some code to their submission script to check and see if the story has already been featured on Digg to avoid these kinds of criticisms. But... if they did that, then where would they get their stories? ;P
-"...bad old ideas look confusingly fresh when they are packaged as technology" - Jaron Lanier (Digital Maoism on Edge.o
Since I cant connect to the site Ill presume to know what it might say.
Ad design firms and artists want a subtle and beautiful presentation. The customer might appreciate the subtleties of the design but they also want to find the necessary information quickly and effeciently. If your page is beautiful but the customer cant find what they were looking in around for in around 3 - 8 seconds they will move on. The same is true in television ads and physical signs. Too much subtlety fails to convey the message at all. Ugly sites with blinking text are anything but subtle. Of course your screaming headlines get attention. On the other hand, too many agressive colors or bold fonts and your design becomes unreadable, which causes the reader to be confused about your message. Rather than struggle through your presentation the reader will more likely try to find a more legible site.
Finding a nice balance between beauty and function is the struggle.
Could not connect: User root has already more than 'max_user_connections' active connections
Vista to eradicate spyware
davecb5620@gmail.com
http://www.term4sale.com/
http://www.stockchase.com/
http://www.americaninsurancebroker.com/
Yup, a blatent attempt at a mini-slashdot effect
For those unable to RTFA due to it being slashdotted, the gist is that Simplicity sells over flashy design.
On that subject, am I the only one who detests flash animation? In my experience, it can be difficult sometimes to convince a website owner they may want to keep it simple when their competitors have a bunch of pomp and flash all over. Such sites annoy the h*ll out of me when I just want some information.
"Build something idiot proof, and someone will build a better idiot" - Samuel Clemens
Well, I find sites that are simplistic and not full of graphics easier to use. Plain and simple.. google.. Google being simplistic and powerfull is what made me choose it over yahoo, msn etc. I used to use webcrawler.com back in the day, why? cause it was simplistic. It was darn ugly but i got what i wanted and fast. You look at the sites you use day to day.. do you find that you tend to like the more functional ones or the pretty ones that leave you going where is x or where is y. With most stuff today ie games, applications etc, i want simplicity, power, and functionality. With eye candy you can make the website/app more complicated and in the end counter intuitive to use.
string sig = llGetSig("dimentox"); llSay(0,sig);
...wait 'till you see what happens when someone figures out how to exploit that little bit of account information ;)
...was a breach of Google's AdSense contract?
PS I have an ugly site. Can I have a front page link too? Thanks!
I'll probably be modded down for this...
The simple fact is, people don't care for fancy graphics. That's nice to look at, but it won't make you come back day after day. What people want is meaningful content, that's easily accessible. People want the semantic web, and RSS feeds from sites all over the net, in a simple browser, not animations that take ages to wade through, and must be waded through differently on each site. Plenty of Fish is a good example of that, but OK Cupid is a better one, and the popularity figures will show the difference.
Heh. I knew I kept this spam for a reason. It sort of reeks of "all your base..."
So, there you have it, people. Sage advice from a spammer. :-)
-- This
Ok, so this isn't really "ugly", but the way that they designed the website forces you to use Internet Explorer only? That's just down right dirty.
http://www.mapleglobal.com/
Technical reasons, my ass!
But the question remains does it earn $10K before or after being posted on slashdot?
200GB/2TB $7.95 Coupon: SAVE90DOLLAR
I elect http://www.pubcrawler.com/ as one of the ugliest.
Orange, green, yellow boxes - tons of text.
And beauty is in the eye of the beholder.
A brownstone building is plain, but beautiful. Glueing an Italiante facade to it because those "architectural elements" have come into fasion does not make the building more beautiful, it makes it false and decadent, simply justifying Santayana's claim that "Fashion is something barbarous, for it produces innovation without reason and imitation without benefit."
Adding commercial "art" to a website to make it "beautiful" simply does the same; and I'll take Shaker furniture over baroque, thank you very much.
It has come to my attention that James Kunstler's blog (Clusterfuck Nation) has been attacked for looking "unprofessional," which rather took me aback, as I considered it one of the few truely professional looking sites left on the web. It's more than plain text, but it is simple and elegant. It gets the job done and does it in way that is graphically pleasing to the eye without being loaded up with fashionable crap. It looks professional. What it doesn't look like is commercial and pandering to whatever happens to be in vogue in commercial psuedo art on order to sell something.
YTMV, of course, but isn't that rather the point?
KFG
So in other words, if your website is too difficult to navigate or doesn't have an immediately obvious function, it won't take off no matter how pretty it is? So if I were to build a car that had 50 horse power but looked pretty and I tried to sell it for 50k, he's predicting I'm going to fail? Come on! This is the most obvious no-brainer conclusion. If your website does jack and people can't figure it out, no design is going to save it. But I guarantee you that there are plenty of really ugly websites, if not more than pretty ones, that fail because they are both unattractive AND hard to navigate.
including one site that makes over $10,000/day in Adsense!
Bullshit.
What's "ugly"? A simple page that doesn't do slide-overs and onmouseover's? A page that doesn't contain anything but what it's here for (Google, anyone?)? A page that flashes and blinks and causes eye cancer at the first look?
What matters is the content. People are willing to endure the worst crap on a page as long as they get what they want. Be it that they find their driver, their download link, or be it that they can write their own little piece of nonsense on a page that they know will be read a damn lot more often than the shiniest blog they could hammer out themselves.
"Ugly" is a page when it doesn't have the content you want, or when the content is so well hidden under a billion layers of ad-popups that you don't care about the content anymore, if you only get away from it it would be sufficient.
So, for me at least, a page can come along HTTP 1.0 compatible, without any graphics, with a grey (i.e. standard) background, as long as it has the info I want, I'm satisfied with that!
It's like with humans. I don't care about the shiny package, it's the content that matters.
We used to have a Bill of Rights. Now, with the rights gone, all we have left is the bill.
*Ahem* Case in point: Myspace. It is one of the most sluggish, kludgy, and ugly websites I have ever seen, but it is also one of the most successful.
My idea of an ugly web page is one with lots of dancing sausage, banner and other ads not only at the top but down the side, a web page where you just don't know what to look at, with an unpredictable mishmash of colors and unrelated content.
BOO YA!
www.supanaked.com
I can't help but feel that this is rather a false premise, that ugly sites can be huge successes. The example that is used in the article is a free dating site. Now there is no shortage of those, but most are not free (at least the large ones) nor are they easy to use. This one seems to cover both of those. Lets face it, a dating site featuring beautiful women is more likely to get traffic than a site teaching you how to build a radio out of bailing twine.
It works.The design is simple, fast (most of the time), and works in any browser.
Often, I hear people say OMG DIGG IS TEH PRETTIER: I'd rather have a site which is fast and easy to navigate than a site which is all eye candy and takes an hour to load.
just my 2 cents.
Obligatory Soundbite Catchphrase
Um.
How about resizing user images proportionally (on a dating website, that _could_ even be important...) to start with. The colors are "pleasing" but they are also washed out (repeated blue on blue). The navigation sucks (site nav, then more site nav, then google ads, then search... ick).
To start with.
I got the full article, and trust me, that was even worse. I had to switch off all colour and font sizes before it was bearable to read.
And then there's the content. Like when he accuses IMDB of having "not even bothered" to change the browser-default font.
In other news, nobody has yet bothered to hit me over the head with a pickaxe. I kinda appreciate that, just like I appreciate that imdb.com doesn't try to override the font that I have carefully selected and configured to be my browsers default.
Perhaps the reason why all these supposedly ugly websites are successful, is that the author has a messed up idea of "ugly".
... That the scruffy looking guys standing on the corners begging for change from all the traffic drive home in brand new sports cars every day, why would the internet be any different.
Wanna fight ? Bend over, stick your head up your ass, and fight for air.
QED
not
s/websites/women/
My lady and I discussed this recently -- we are both AdSense users and have debated the need to advertiser (I don't like it, but it does cover the cost of hosting and a little of my time).
The worst websites are eyesores, but generate a lot of income (not in our case, although our sites are ugly). The reason many websites make money on AdSense right now is because a user finds the site via a search engine, sees nothing they like and just wants to get away. Yet these eyesore sites sometimes don't offer a lot of exit links -- except for the ads. The user clicks the ad just to get out (instead of closing the browser window), which earns the site money.
Google AdSense is incorporating a new way of paying the sites called "Smart Pricing" -- it attempts to figure out if your site is truly generating a customer for the advertiser or if your site is looking to capitalize on stupid users. Thousands of "Made for AdSense" site operators are complaining that their recent incomes have dropped 80% or more. I can appriciate Google looking for sites that are merely click harvesters.
Plenty of Fish is an oddity -- he's actually providing an interesting service. The users are not geeks like you and me (we likely will rarely click an ad). The best market to focus AdSense on is the teenagers and the housewives who are unaware of the advertising potential. In the short run, the sites that focus on the layman rather than the geeks will be the ones who will make the most money -- until Google finds ways to qualify if the clicker really becomes a consumer.
How many geeks here have every clicked a relevant ad on slashdot?
ebay has got to be the posterchild for "first mover advantage." Not only is the site ugly, but the user interface is one of the worst I have ever seen in my life. Yet they are one of the most sucessful websites ever!!
There is a whole dot-com economy around making ebay easier to use. See ChannelAdvisor for example.
Think Deeply.
Websites that offer something interesting or of quickly-absorbed value are sites that are successful. Whether or not a site is ugly is not always relevant to its success. I've seen very many beautiful and well-programmed sites that don't "get off the ground." Sites that get good "forward mojo" or have something funny or valuable do the best.
Some sites are both ugly and ineffective (like my website) - but the reason is not because of their attractiveness... it is the subject matter, the ease-of-use, or a combination of both...
A Passionate Independent Musician
sometimes i wonder about the motivations of slashdot. the story links directly to a page with spam. at least on digg.com the community can pull the article by voting if it sucks, that way only good articles are out there.
Can you figure out how to order something? How long did it take you? Keep trying. They really do sell online. Can you find the link? You'll find it quickly with Google (they have an ordinary Yahoo Store site), but can you find it on their main site? Don't give up. It will be worth it.
I'm the "webmaster" of our domain(s). Our websites are fugly, but functional. I'm primarily a programmer. I can do HTML and I know what I like, but I'm not good at website design. We've been around since ~1994 when our first website was hosted on a NeXT workstation.
I think if you're offering something unique it really doesn't matter whether your site is pretty or ugly, as long as it's informative, functional, and you treat your customers right people will keep coming back.
The plentyoffish site is ugly due to the thumbnails of users on the front page?
then my website will make me a gibillionair! My picture is all over it!
It's not too brilliant to run a web server as root, now, is it...
My sig is too lon
Why does the article writer think that the beauty or ugliness of a website has such connections with the popularity or generated revenue ? This only shows that the site's creator isn't a web designer guru, nothing more. If the services provided are worth the money, I'd certainly use and pay for it, even if the looks of the site needs to be desired. Besides, nice or ugly, it's really subjective stuff, shouldn't be the basis of such speculations.
I am putting myself to the fullest possible use, which is all I can think that any conscious entity can ever hope to do.
...when he brings up classic Google as a paradigm example of an "ugly" webpage.
A huge part of Google's appeal is that it looks much BETTER than the busy, cluttered designs of "portals" like Yahoo. It's not sacrificing functionality for form; it is IMPROVING functionality by simplifying the form. Back when I had dialup, the difference in page load time between Google and Yahoo was amazing, purely because Google wasn't crammed with 100k of links and ads I didn't want.
www.RLT.com (My own)
As long as we're advertising web sites like Amazon, Ebay and Fishes inc., I might as well get a plug too.
"He who lives without folly isn't so wise as he thinks." -- Francois de La Rochefoucauld
...Ugly websites Slashdot you! Bwahahahahahahahahaha....ha?
I quickly realized that there are a lot of ugly websites that are extremely successful.
....*cough* so true.
Or lack thereof, seems a major part of this. How many "pretty" websites use a retarded and slow loading flash "interface", in quotes because it's more of just a face which refuses to really interact. All this and the rise of the much touted AJAx, which has done nothing significant to improve my experiences on websites.
The majority of people in the US do not have broadband. Shit, I have broadband but share it with others in my house. Sometimes it doesn't run so fast; but craigslist almost always will load in a few seconds.
A blog about stuff.
Some of the most difficult to use Web sites that exist are sites that look stunning. This has been the case ever since the Web garnered attention from graphical designers and advertisers.
This is nothing new, and good Web designers recognize this.
On a side note, it is often the case that advertisers can sell an idea that looks good to the client, but that same look might do nothing to attract customers.
What does it take for a website to be beautiful?
#1) No javascript and no java and no activeX (and it must work without cookies, if it uses them)
#2) No large files
#3) Only very small images
#4) Obvious navigation buttons
Anything else?
Ugly also tends to "test" better in print as well.
I think they come across as more personal/more trusty.. which is what the article said.. It's like you can see the hand of the person who build it but with a glossy site all you can see is some mindless corporation..
http://www.hawknest.com/
... I think ugly has nothing to do with it. Nor does pretty - csszendesign.com (as mentioned elsewhere) courts graphic designers rather than interface engineers, and it shows. The sites there are magnificently beautiful and almost exclusively unusable.
To use a dating site may seem like a bad example, but I think it's perfect - simplicity, usability (or clicks that translate into instant results), and content that people want are all more important in the long run than pretty stuff. This is not to say that pretty isn't important for some - a corporate site should reflect an elegance that will breed confidence in the company itself. But any kind of down-and-dirty sales site should be content-first. It can be done attractively (amazon.com is, of course, a great example of simple-but-broad usability with a pleasant design), but content is what sells.
So an ugly dating site with pics of hot chicks will sell. The interface is worth picking through for visitors. An elegant and usable design without the pictures of hot chicks simply wouldn't work.
If you haven't already, read Don't Make Me Think by Steve Krug http://www.stevekrug.com/. It's a brilliant and simple gateway drug into the endless world of usability. First you read that, then you read his friend Lou Rosenberg's Information Architecture for the World Wide Web and before you know it you're reading Edward Tufte and sneaking around behind your wife's back building XUL or Python apps.
Once you're hooked, read The Art of Human-Computer Interface Design and The Humane Interface by Jef Raskin. The former ...
1 42879216/sr=2-1/ref=pd_bbs_b_2_1/103-2350046-67374 16?s=books&v=glance&n=283155
...
1 42879290/sr=2-1/ref=pd_bbs_b_2_1/103-2350046-67374 16?s=books&v=glance&n=283155
http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/0201517973/qid=1
... is ancient by web chronology, but it sure does offer insight into interface design (including a great article about building a touch screen for Koko the sign-language-taught gorilla). The latter
http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/0201379376/qid=1
... is what happens when you get so deeply into interface design that you forget that the average users need things to stick to some of the more common conventions (right or wrong). Still, it offers a great view of where to start thinking about maximum interface efficiency.
Point is, all of this usability information is great and very important to know if you do this stuff for a living for a broad range of clients. However, it's not the be-all-end-all when it comes to pure information transfer. If you can get a fast-loading site with fewer usability conventions to sell your widgets (in the example given, that shouldn't be hard), why add to load times or add to the potential problems users will have? Go ugly and let your content sell itself.
It is pitch black. You are likely to be eaten by a grue.
Keep It Simple, Stupid.
Since this is an article on web design, I feel its worth point out two things about the referenced article;
;)
1 - ads with audio are damned annoying and almost always a bad thing in my opinion.
2 - IMHO, news sites and blogs should ALWAYS allow the user to use the "text size" menu option for those with bad eyesite.
Flame ON!
"Build something idiot proof, and someone will build a better idiot" - Samuel Clemens
Slashdot.org is also an ugly website..
nywanna is daoustmark. I am the same person...I submitted to both Slashdot and Digg. Hope that's not a problem.
I should add that resizing the text works in Firefox, but not IE.
"Build something idiot proof, and someone will build a better idiot" - Samuel Clemens
It's not a suprise that ugly-but-functional websites are successful in attracting and retaining visitors. Remember this: people visit a site looking for something. First and foremost, the site has to make it fairly easy (or at least straightforward) for visitors to get what they came there for. All else matters only after you've done that. If you meet that first requirement, visitors will forgive an awful lot of ugly. Functional and attractive is best, but if they have to choose visitors will choose functional over pretty when it comes time to actually use things. Note that your focus groups may not reflect this, because they're generally giving only the user's first impressions. First impressions fade fast when it comes time to actually do something.
Its been reviewed at Webmasterworld and Threadwatch as well as Scobeilizer (sp?). Pretty well documented.
The trust issue comes into play (at least for me) much more with sites offering free software. I might just be tempted to install some free widget from an ugly site that looks like its maintained on the cheap by some benevolent soul, but I'll run for the hills if some slick site offers me "free" software. What's paying for the site design, if not spyware, etc.?
I'm not a 'gamer' in any sense of the word, however I DO know that good gameplay trumps good graphics any day of the week. A website that "works" trumps any good looking site any day. Flashy sites take a long time to load, offer confusing navigation and an overall unpleasant experience. Sites like Craigslist looks like crap but are useful as hell.
As was pointed out by an AC, one person submits the same story to two different tech blogs. No harm, no foul. I just seeth when some punk snatches a previously posted story on Digg and submits it to /. Heck, your submission didn't even make it out of the queue at Digg. Seems to have done much better over here. My apologies if I have offended you in any way. I picked the wrong day to stop sniffing glue.
Where can I get certification for this?
I rely on my web site for my business (I am a consultant living in a remote area, so most of my business initially comes from my web site). I have about as many people complement me on the simplicity of my site as other people who helpfully suggest things like "Hey, you really need to hire a web designer" :-)
:-)
I think it comes down to what you need from a web site. I have one consulting page that is for my business, but I put a lot of non-work related stuff on my web site, and again I get some friendly advice that that is a bit unprofessional and un-focused. As an example, I have a link to my Flickr picture site right on my main menu. I did this because I enjoy seeing a picture or two of people whose work I read, but will likely never meet so I figure why not share a little. (I also put a picture on my main page of my wife and I in front of the Taj Mahal - not so professional perhaps, but fun
...and now it REALLY sucks dogballs: http://www.techdirt.com./
I've been using it for a dreadfully long time (fortunately, with a couple of breaks) and I've never found it ugly. It is functional. It does exacly what it's supposed to, without embellishment, and without confusion. This is ellegance. The only thing about it that I find ugly is the needless stock photography at the top of the page.
"However, You may accurately disclose the amount of Google's gross payments to You pursuant to the Program." (from the Terms and Conditions, point 9 "Confidentiality").
Seriously. I mean, it's last "overhaul" was going to CSS. And what did we get? The SAME shit again.
Sadly this is very true. Slashdot is pretty much 90's design, the usability is very poor...
Starting with the main page. OK, I log in. So now I see my username at the left with links to my preferences, journal, etc. Then, I look at the right and...my username again. Sorry guys, can you just keep all user-related info in the SAME place? (Hint: usability is also the reason why many people uses livejournal and blogger instead of slashdot journals to blog)
Then look at every commentary (ej, yours). Below your comment I see this link (with center alignment, I don't know why) " Re:Slashdot is successful too... by ericdano (Score:1) ". Where on earth is that link pointing to? OK, so everybody knows it's the parent, but where is the interface saying that to you?
And the answers to that commentary are just below. Can't people just add a "Answers to this commentary", or something?
And the centered "table" with information about the moderation. Do I really want to know the details of the moderation? Maybe if I've moderation points (I don't). What I don't understand is why that table is centered and far from the place where moderation is show (top of the commentary)
Oh, and now let's go with the search field. Did you know slashdot has a search field? It has, it's just in the LAST place where you'd want it to be, in the top BOTTOM of every page.
And the left "menu". There's SO MUCH unuseful crap there that it hurts.
Oh, and the icons at the upper top of the page which represent the topics of the recently posted stories. It's just me who thinks that icons mean NOTHING? Even if you know what the icon means (and I doubt the computer icon means something to somebody in a computer-related site), if you want to tell users what have been the latest stories posted why not put some text about the stories themselves? Icons don't tell me if I want to click them - there're mozilla stories I want to read and there're mozilla stories I do NOT want to read so I just never click those icons
Hell, I'm not even a usability expert, but it's clear that slashdot does NOT looks good. I know there's a page where you get the list of the stories recently posted by all users for example, but I have NO idea where to find it. Sometimes I find it but I quickly forget it because it's not obvious at all.
There's a reason why sites like digg are gaining users: Is not that they're better, they just don't make you suffer to use them. They use javascript (slashdot could keep generating non-ajax code depending on the browser or keep a "old browser" compatibility page somewhere), etc.
And if it takes two years to modify the slash code to make slashdot usable just like it took years to make slash to use CSS, it means the slash code is crap.
After reading the article, I have to say that there was nothing in it that convinces me of its argument. Its assertion that ugliness conveys trust, which later on is used as the basis for this rationale, is spurious at best. And the author seems to be aware of this, as indeed he states at the conclusion that "Its Not Necessarily Ugliness That Sells", but that we should keep in mind not only the visual but the usability aspects of web sites when designing them.
So in short, it offers nothing new.
-dZ.
Carol vs. Ghost
I run bunch of different websites. That range from pretty to down right ugly as hell... my most popular site by far, which does earn some money from adsense (not a ton but enough for server costs and such), i smy most ugly site... i mean it actually goes against pretty much any design convention you hear about... I dont even run spell check on the page, but it is hugely popular which has always confused me cause i always get angry emails from users requesting i clean it up, but i dont think it ever would have spread so much if it did look pretty and corporate, it makes me underground and honest.
my ugly energy drink website
Dan Mayer: my blog, essays, art, etc
The article picks a poor term, "ugly", for what it's trying to say. It assumes general agreement on ugliness. It gives some highly opinionated examples of "ugly" websites, and mentions a few elements of ugliness in a "you know what I mean" way. I can agree flashing clashing colors and images mangled by too much low quality editing and compression are ugly, but Times New Roman font? The only knock against the font seems to be it's the default, as if text is not beautiful until the site designers spend a lot of time on their very own custom font. What is the article trying to do here, upbraid website designers for going crazy making flashy trashy pages, or for not going crazy over a font? Psst, Firefox can override fonts and colors. Throughout the article professes astonishment that a simple grubby website can succeed in spite of quickly made amatuerish, primitive web pages, as if there's some profound insight in that observation and the reasons why, when all the thinking is resting on badly defined criteria. It's like comparing the "beautiful" Versailles to the average "ugly" government building of a democracy. Many people find places like Versailles garish and impractical-- you hardly dare breathe in there for fear of damaging something fragile and valuable. How about an ugly bit, right next to the evil bit?
Intellectual Property is a monopolistic, selfish, and defective concept. It is "tyranny over the mind of man"
Does anyone else want to shoot the stupid auto-talking advertisement on that ugly site?
Do you guys really think this is true? That was the whole reason this article was news anyway. I think it is crap.
Like a lot of people here have said, simple websites are not necessary ugly. Actually it mights even be beautiful. It is not always the bell and whistle that make something nice (the same often apply for a woman!).
Doing something right a simple way is sometime more demanding than doing it more complicated, because it requires some thoughts.
A lot of people here will say Google is ugly (let's say we talk only about the search engine part). Personally I won't put it into ugly. It is even neat-o/cute/younameit. And for google they even change the logo in the homepage for a lot of events (and they are quite cool usually). It is simple, but clean.
Is eBay that ugly and wrong (I have not done a deep analysis here and I have been a big user of it, so maybe I am just used to it), I don't think so. It is simple, it is easy to scan text in the page (lot of space, etc.)
Is amazon ugly? I will say it has a lot of space as well, you can scan the text, etc. I'm less an user of Amazon thought... before I often thought that some page was jampacked of information, but still it is easy to scan them (well I look now and some page have a load of information).
The guy correctly concludes that function is more important than form and that more sites should emulate them. But I disagree with his assertion that web sites like IMDB, Craigslist, or eBay are "ugly"; they are clean and simple designs that work.
In fact, I suspect that what the author considers "eautiful, CSS designed web sites" corresponds to what I consider ugly.
In any case, the take-home message is the same as for many other engineering problems: Keep It Simple, Stupid.
Why is this news? Who ever proposed the idea that site layout, color scheme and overall visual appeal had any corellation at all with it's money making abilities? Sites are visited and, more importantly, revisited due to content. The more visitors, the more ads get clicked, the more money is made.
Nice looking quality sites have their place. I would encourage any offline business that has a site to create a site that reflects positively on their company. Anyone working in design or arts should probably have a site that reflects on their work. For most of the rest of us, beauty is just a bonus. Content is much more important than the beauty or ugliness of the site.
Find coupons in Greeley
Wow. That's gotta be the prettiest (artsy) site I've seen that has actual content. You're right though, it's not made to be quick-in-quick-out.
Everyone is entitled to his own opinions, but not his own facts.
Now that IS success.
http://soul-amp.com/
Oh BTW there is a new tune up if you were one of the several hundred who visited last time I posted a "shameless self-promotion link post".
We wrote and recorded "Setting Traps" on Saturday.
I used mostly bad HTML...in developing the site...(so old school). So not only is the site basically ugly....but for the pictures. But so is the code.
So I figure the high ranking is due to several factors, like being on the net for 10 years, but also being all text and spending more time on content than on 'aspect'. See how many sites have their menus entirely in mouseover graphics of JavaScript... What do you want Google to do with those ?
But it does look ugly, particularly in Mozilla/Firefox which doesn't seem to respect float and alignment orders in CSS. Or at least in any way I could control. If anybody has a workaround...
Non-Linux Penguins ?
Not ugly sells, but simple sells? I'd put it in graphic design terms: "pretty alone doesn't sell". I used to work for a web design/hosting company doing CGI development (way back in the day!) and it never ceased to amaze me at how much time the graphic designers spent on page layout, getting tables to align right, and generally making the web world mimic the print world. Not once did they ever care about how the shopping cart order flow or database search functionality worked. Looks like it's 10 years later and they are only now just "getting it".
* You don't want your friends to see them: ("Uhh, yeah, I forgot my URL..." - "Umm, yeah, you can't come over, the dog just threw up").
* They both go down a lot
When I am browsing the web to buy or search for information, these are the sites I define as "Ugly": 1. A site that has banners all over with animated gifs 2. A site that has black text on a dark background 3. A site that has a tiled background that hides the buttons, text and other content of the site. 4. A site that has large print with Infomercial style of Ads 5. A site that has automatic midi/wav playing with no means to turn it off. 6. A site that has been made in "free webhosting" areas, (IE: GeoCities, etc.) 7. A site that has no text... just images. 8. A site that has no images.... just text. 9. A site that leaves no info regarding contacting the person or company. 10. A site that tells me to vote for their site, asks directly to click on a link, or just sends me to a place I don't want to go. 11. A site that tries applying cryptic navigation. 12. A site that has dead links, and dated news, (by a few years or so.)
"To err is human, doing it again is downright stupidity!"
/. is faster than Digg these days on dial-up connections too. :) I take speed and texts any day!
Ant(Dude) @ Quality Foraged Links (AQFL.net) & The Ant Farm (antfarm.ma.cx / antfarm.home.dhs.org).
Mildly relevant comment related to bad naming: I drove by a new bar yesterday, called "Fox and Hounds English Pub and Grill". Who would want to go to a bar to meet women there? What horrible odds, one fox, lots of dogs!
..How good do those "good looking" sites really look once you've disabled the ads and flash parts of them? This is what most knowledgeable users and IT departments do these days anyway to reduce the visual spam and conserve bandwidth..
www.boznz.com Simple solutions to complex problems.
If you want to view an ugly but very usefull page, see:
g uration.html
http://www.nongnu.org/util-vserver/doc/conf/confi
This page describes how to configure Linux Vservers. This page is called
"The Great Flower Page" and is the configuration reference for version 2.0.
OMG! That website is an abomination of unusability. That scrolling menu is a PITA to use. And 10 minutes into your challenge, and I still haven't the slightest clue where to order from. I really don't have allday to browse this website, so I can't wait for someone to post the answer for how to order, just so I can see where it's at.
whoa... I like the acceleration/deccerlation features of the menu. God forbid clickable menu options be stationary. It reminds me of that scene from Airplane where one guy says, "shouldn't we turn on the landing lights?" And Rex Cramer gets this conspiratorial look and says, "No! That's just what they'd be expecting us to do!"
I wouldn't disagree with you. The site needs a redesign, and will be getting it. :)
Moving past the "The article is really ugly, it's just an error mesage" jokes, here's some issues with the article:
Getting pickier here... the header (blue on blue) is hard to read. Links are the wrong colour - as a user, brown-ish red means a link I've already been to, not a new link. It may look pretty, but it breaks user expectations.
Look at the "Rate This Article" at the bottom. It uses numbers as links. Great, I just love single character anchors.
The problem with web design is that too many companies hire people who came from advertising. The web is not an advertising medium - you can advertise as part of it, but fundamentally, if I'm reading your site, you have my attention already. Stop trying to get my attention, and focus on letting me get to the information I want as quickly and efficiently as possible. I'm am not here to drool over how many hours you spent deciding my web browser is 900 pixels wide, I am here to acquire information and move on to something more enjoyable.
Having said that, actually ugly web sites are bad. If your website looks like you just discovered the header 1-5 buttons in Dreamweaver, and would have used a blinking marquee if you knew how, I'm going to avoid it. Bright yellow 24pt text on a light blue background is going to give me a headache. Plain websites are fine (Slashdot), efficient websites are ideal (GMail), but pretty sites I have to wrestle to get anywhere on, or ugly sites that look like they were created by a colour blind five year old are bad.
They whose government reduces their essential liberties for temporary security, receive neither liberty nor security.
Wow! Just wow. Whoever designed that website should be shot, no strike
that, they should be skinned alive and a video of that should be made
into an intro sequence to the website. I gave up looking for a way to
buy their stuff once it started to give me a headache.
That said, thanks for the link. I do like their stuff, esp. their shoes.
But that's without knowing the prices because I can't find that info
anywhere on the damn website. I do know they sell through Bloomies and
Macys so they probably are expensive but not out of this world
expensive. Now that I think about it, it's just as well that their
website sucks: I wouldn't buy clothing online anyway so they just need
to have pretty pictures and look stylish which the website does. However
even finding physical store locations is painful. Damn I hate that
site. Oh the headache.
Less is more with web design. Make it fast, easy to navigate, produce and modify. Make it do what it needs to, no more, and no less. Use videos and flash when you need it, not because you want to or you can.
God, this page practically has more words of ad-sense then then it does of content. And such vapid conclusions too.
Anyway, ugly websites do well, that's for sure. Cragslist, Fark, Slashdot. All of those are site that have been popular over the years. I doubt an ugly site could compete today...
autopr0n is like, down and stuff.
The comment about trust is interesting. When you're buying something do you want a slick salesperson or a down-to-earth one? The lesson is use a flashy web site to sell to flashy people, but use a plain one for the rest of us.
Maybe it's only a way of standing out for the few people who spearhead the latest trends and fashion, and the billion people who are all wearing the same things are just the people who don't want to be seen as 'unable to adapt to the latest 'best thing''.
It is elegantly simple, unobtrusive, and everything works as you would expect it to. Which in my eye = BEAUTY.
No worries. It takes A LOT to offend me. Heck, just read through some of the comments here and know that I haven't been offended yet. :)
I refuse to use all those "pretty,graphical" "userfriendly 2MB flash" sites.Its like stuffing extra popup ads which you need to click in order to reach content.and enter a Verification code from a Captcha image.
Gosh, it's almost like being back at absurd.org back when they actually updated it.
As a republican I feel it my responsibity to manufacture criminals. People need punished!
Jacob Nielson's site,, is a good place to start. From his latest article:
He then lists "the biggest issues that led to lost business value in some of our recent consulting projects."
Also from Nielson's latest: "the biggest design flaws destroying business value typically involve Communicating clearly, Providing information users want, and Offering simple, consistent page design, clear navigation, and an information architecture that puts things where users expect to find them."
In short, as Nielson puts it: "Content rules. It did ten years ago, and it does today."
-mcgrew(.info for my ugly site:)
Follow these rules, grasshopper.
Easy to use.
Quick loading.
Focused.
(I believe this is also referred to as K.I.S.S.)
This guy seems to have a very odd perception of ugly. While I will grant that Plenty of Fish may not be the most attractive page ever, I would have to take issue with many of the other sites listed in the article. Craig's list is most certainly not ugly, and neither is Google (he doesn't outright call Google ugly, but he certainly implies it). And while I do see room for improvement on imdb, I see nothing wrong with their choice (or rather, lack thereof) of font. He seems to associate simplicity and functionality with ugliness, which is many times the opposite of the truth. Unfortunate, because he makes good points about functionality and targetting the right audience and then throws it all away when he calls sites that do these things "ugly".
To borrow a thought from a previous thread here, he probably thinks Microsoft's redesigned iPod package is prettier than the original as well.
After having read the actual article, I am left with the distasteful impression that this article is nothing more than a cleverly disguised ad for an ad supported dating website.
If I don't put anything here, will anyone recognize me anymore?
...seriously. I suppose I should have known clicking on "plentyoffish.com" was probably not a good idea at work, but honestly, a bit of warning that is was more like pussygalore.com would have been nice.
Websites are like women. The more make-up women wear, the more you think, "fake." just like websites, the more that's covering the content, the more you think "fake."
And let's face, the simple women with lots of content (ie, knowledge), the better ^_^
I don't know about that. As much as I enjoy the content on this site, the layout is not as successful as it could be.
As an interactive designer I tend to see two extremes off bad design. One looks like Slashdot and or Craig's List, and the other looks like something that should be submitted to FlashKit. The latter usually uses an off-putting "cool for cool's sake" layout that doesn't effectively communicate because it's to busy trying to be being awesome. The former doesn't care as much about being cool, nevertheless, tends to disregard basic elements of typography and visual hierarchy that would make a site easier to read and navigate.
I'm fairly familiar with the slash layout now, but when I first started following links to this site I found it incredibly confusing. Moreover, I've learned not to direct people to Slashdot if they're not familiar with the site. As lame as this sounds, Slashdot has a learning curve to it. I've seen it shy people away on several occasions.
All in all, there are things that could be done. Slashdot could be refreshed in a way that didn't abandon it's identity or functionality. For example, look at the 2002 redesign of the Wall Street Journal. Many people didn't even recognize the change, yet they found the paper easier to read.
Good graphic design is never about hot flashy graphics, it's about effective communication. And often this involves resolving the countless bits of minutia people don't realize they rely upon to read.
"Things are more moderner than before- bigger, and yet smaller- it's computers-- San Dimas High School football RULES!"
working for Tech Support for an ISP. I Love this right here :
As Internet professionals, we often forget that a large part of our society is actually afraid of the Internet. Although online shopping is growing, most people still have concerns about online security and the impersonal nature of the web. Most people do not know how to surf efficiently and use only the default tools that are given to them when they take their computer out of the box.
...but I don't think mom and pop shops are any more trust worthy than the big guys. Its about ethics. Mom and Pop can be unethical bastards just as easily as Wal Mart can. And its harder for Wal Mart to disappear into the night. No, an ugly website does not lead me to trust it. It leads me to wonder why they didn't invest some money into marketing, and what other parts of their business they might do half ass.
Read my short stories - You won't regret it.
I give up. That's the most atrocious site I've seen in a long time. I tried for 15 minutes, and hell if there's anything useful on there, or anything that would make me want to buy their crap.
http://www.arngren.net/
Digg isn't ugly enough!
Analogies don't equal equalities, they are merely somewhat analogous.
Simple is not ugly. Simplicity is often beautiful.
"Not bothering to change the default font" is not ugly. It is a right thing not to do for the main body of text on your pages. The idea is that the user would sooner or later figure out what font and font size are looking best on his screen, and set it as default in his browser. Any deviation from it a website imposes is therefore likely to look worse than browser default. Slashdot has this one right, by the way: only navigation menus are in changed font size, but the main text is user default.
Plentyoffish does not look ugly to me. It's OK.
Maybe the author has too much time on his hands to write articles because nobody needs his services of developing "pretty" websites?
17779 eligible voters in a district, 17779 'vote' as one. This is Russia.
And yet, News Corps still paid $580M for MySpace.
cpeterso
Thank you Slashdot!
I've also taken to using bookmarklets like "Clean Read" to make news articles legible on overcrowded sites: http://www.smokinggun.com/code/bookmarklets.php
Oy, this will be an interesting girl search...
I, for one, welcome our blocky quasi-socialist-realist overlords
The final paragraph of TFA says it all, what sells is a functional website. IMHO, anything requiring flash+javascript is usually neither functional nor pretty.
Oops, if I sounded snippy, I didn't mean too. BTW, liked the article. It'll come in handy the next time someone wants to load the "latest greatest" piece of bloat onto a website. :)
"Build something idiot proof, and someone will build a better idiot" - Samuel Clemens
Google's not ugly - it's plain and clean without extraneous decoration, and tries hard not to distract the user visually or slow the user down waiting for animated decorations and complex style-sheets to draw, but fundamentally the reason it wins is that it produces very good search results very fast. IMHO, the "I'm Feeling Lucky" button is extraneous decoration, though it does add some personal feel to it, but it's something that other search engines wouldn't have even considered because they didn't have good enough page ranking algorithms to make it likely that the first hit would be one you wanted.
Craigslist is also ugly - the front page hits you with every category they've got, and you can do a bit of narrowing by geography, and everything else is just date order or a search. But they've done enough community-building that there's so much content, and the interface is pretty much good enough to find what you need and a bit of extra random stuff for fun.
Bill Stewart
New Fast-Compression-only CPR http://preview.tinyurl.com/dy575ks
Shitty websites make ad money because people click the ads and leave. They have no interest in staying. That has been my experience. My better websites with actual designs and content are less profitable (from ads) because people want to stay there.
At what price learning? At what cost wisdom? The price is a man's peace of mind, and the cost is his life.
What this does mean is that you should never sacrifice the usability of your website for a fancy design effect or a more visually appealing website.
Why do the vast majority of fancy website designers seem to not know this?
I say we go to flashdot and make slashdot a flashdot flashy flash flash page!
And it would only work if it's posted in Digg BEFORE being posted here.
True, but we used to call that an Elegant page/site. Simple, to the point and not an eyesore. When you arrive at a nice style that works, you tend to stick with it and people in the shop who try to cram too much busy-whizzy into a page have to break it up.
Sadly, I was once forced into unspeakable crimes of development by an analyst who wanted to give the users EVERYTHING of EVERY FSCKING PAGE and still have it SIMPLE and ELEGANT. Such idiocy...
A feeling of having made the same mistake before: Deja Foobar
From the article: Websites cannot be trusted, but individuals can be trusted. Just... what? Whoa, I feel like giving my credit card number to some individual I found on the internet! No registered business name, no history, no physical business location! What could possibly go wrong?
From the Best Page in the Universe, about halfway down:
..."
"2. Protest. I'm keeping my web site shitty as a protest against all the slick-looking, contentless web sites out there. Nobody cares about your stupid rotating icons and fading links. Mine isn't the only site on the internet that uses a simple layout, perhaps you've heard of this one?
_Picture of Google here_
Some webmasters have spent years tweaking their layout and designing their site, and very few get any traffic. This site, as shitty as it looks, gets over 1 million visits per month. I use large fonts also as a protest against all the stylish garbage you see out there. When I go to a web site, I WANT TO READ THE CONTENT. Trust me, that micro-font everyone uses isn't nearly as original as they think.
All Hail Maddox!
I wouldn't be surprised to find out Marcus is behind the writing of the article. He's stated in the past that his intention is to put the paid dating sites out of business.
Pete Carr Owner Chatmag.com
Hey, not everyone is allowed to buy this stuff, you know.
I don't read Digg regularly. I do check /. most days. What's wrong with an interesting link being posted on both sites? I visit here because they include an interesting selection of links from all over and (usually) intelligent discussion. Who cares is Digg (or someone else) posted it first?
There is nothing so powerful as an idea whose time has come.
These are the same people who say that text consoles are ugly and GUIs are cool...
Some programs just plain don't need a GUI.
Some websites just plain don't need to be fancy.
As a bunch of people have already said, simple != ugly... now, in some cases, it wouldn't hurt the site to add some graphics to it, or maybe make the design a little more complex; if you do it right you can probably make it look nicer *and* retain all of the ease of use. But, again, mere simplicity is not the same thing as ugliness.
And personally, I far far prefer a well designed but simple layout to an overly complex layout. Like for instance, about 95% of the 'news' websites out there - that whole thing about cramming the article into the center 30% of the screen and then putting advertisements, links to the 'most popular' news stories, and whatever else all around it (or even worse, *in* the middle of the article), splitting the article into 150 3-sentence pages so that you have to keep clicking on 'next page' all the time, etc.. that's just plain not useful.
(And yes, I know that a lot of that, especially putting the ads in the middle of the article, is on purpose; but that doesn't change the fact that it's incredibly annoying)
Designs should enhance the site, not get in the way of the site. You can make a very pleasing design without making it override the function; in other words, you don't have to think of it as 'function over form' but rather as 'function *and* form'.
And of course, the whole subject of ads at all is a big one.. I haven't seen very many sites that have advertisements on them (except where the ad was designed specifically to go on the website in question, rather than being a generic google ad or something like that) that actually made the ad *fit* with the rest of the site. Almost invariably, the ads made the site uglier.
Early bird may get the worm.. but the second mouse gets the cheese.
From the article:
Drudge Report is a very simple website that is essentially a collection of links to news stories.
Drudge Report is not popular because it looks like shit. It's popular because a lot of us like Drudge's personality and his choice in news stories. It's just like why we like Rush Limbaugh, Dog The Bounty Hunter, CSI, and The Apprentice. Everything comes together: personalities, content, format, and implementation.
I'd love to see a wide survey of just what ads, and where people are willing to tolerate, or would be likely to visit. I own 3 domains , phpglue .com .net and .org , and I wanted to do something with them.
...
.. not likely to get much with those. Servers are expensive :(
Would be a really neat community focusing on what other similar communities leave out, like how to build something like thttpd with php5 + sqlite / etc. Interesting stuff. Some sane ajax lessons, whatever people wanted to contribute.
The problem is if it takes off, that little hobby is screaming for a few dual opty's and its own switch, or a cluster. Thats a ton of cash to spend. So you can
1 - throw a few google ads up nobody clicks.
2 - throw lots of google ads up and hope a few get clicked
3 - beg for donations to keep the site up
Or, a combination of the above. I'm pretty keen at being able to tell if someone's putting up a site just to pollute a SE and get me to click ads. So when I find them, I usually leave unless I *really* need to get at whatever content (if any) they have. But putting up my neat idea and putting adsense up, well I fear other people would put me in the same boat as the clicktraps.
I know I could craft a very very nice looking site with perfectly semantically correct html, i.e. use of proper headings, unordered lists where appropriate, etc. But I'm almost afraid to. I'm either going to go broke supporting it or get passed by from the people I hope to serve with it.
I know placement of ads is important too, I wouldn't interrupt a tutorial with a freakin banner (man I can't stand that). I'm not worried about the sites making money, I'm worried about them costing money. I wish people wouldn't abuse adsense like they do , takes a really useful tool away from folks who (just may) put something useful up that turns up well in a search. Maybe I'll try subscriptions but
Off my soapbox...
Yes, usability is content + design. I pretty much said that. But, it's not just graphic design. In fact, that's a relatively unimportant sub-component of the kind of design it does need: information design.
In Soviet Russia, websites make you ugly?
Brocklesby Park Cricket Club
maybe i ts actually suiting the type of business? i remember shopping at boutiques and an atelier's flagship when i was younger [and richer and stupider] and if you did not look like you were the type to buy it was never mentioned... this kind of weird attitude similar to "if you have ot ask you cannot afford it" like if your not already one of us with the right clothes we wont sell you this anyway. weird psychology to justify the purchase of overpriced garments no doubt. increases the deisre factor!
this is probably the web equivalant
"foolish boy! it is vulgar to 'sell' my art over zis internet to a buffoon like you if you were worthy you owuld already be granted its divine priveledge even now! there is no webshop! what is zis, zis thing you refer to as paypal?"
The site seems to have a bit in common with the friend finder sites? It has links to adult friend finder. There are lots of examples on the net of AFF being a major scam that never purges their old data.
Arhh they can afford it.
Everyone knows they could have spent $5m on 30 web designer hot shots to redo their own in under 6 weeks, but
they only paid for the CLIENTS, not the site.
Liberty freedom are no1, not dicks in suits.
1. 5/6 of their flash crap could be done with animated GIF, LAMERS
2. Color scheeme is gona give me glucoma god damn it.
3. talk about 60% cpu load on a 2.8ghz machine, IDIOTS
Btw why is FLASH so crap, why cannot it be smart and pre-render the 4 second loop in compressed bitmaps
and play it back that way. These lamers from macromedia should talk to real coders from the amiga days
who could do 10x flash ability in 7mhz cpus. Again IDIOTS.
4. as the website say in its first 3 letters, ASS it is.
Liberty freedom are no1, not dicks in suits.
No harm, no foul. I just seeth when some punk snatches a previously posted story on Digg and submits it to /.
This is just a wild guess, but I'm thinking that maybe, just maybe, there's not a whole lot else going on in your life.
Personally, things like poverty, injustice and corruption make me seeth. People submitting the same story to two different tech websites is pretty low down the list. In fact I would go so far as to say that if it ever made my list at all, I would seriously consider suicide.
Actually, I've read Slashdot for a long time. Pretty much since they started. The quality has declined in recent years and I have been looking for a good substitute. But there isn't one. A friend pointed me at Digg and I took a look. I wasn't to impressed initially because it didn't seem organized and homogenous enough (I can do without Windows only news) for my tastes. But I took a look again recently and I found they've been refining the UI a bit. It's still not good enough for me to want to get an account, but it's getting better. There's just something about rubbing elbows with more Windows users than I have to that I find uncomfortable. The only issue I've got now is that their categories are TOO specific. Basically, I just want a reproduction of Slashdot with no political discussion and less news about Windows and Microsoft and NO ADS. So you can see why I've been having a hard time finding a good site for that...
-"...bad old ideas look confusingly fresh when they are packaged as technology" - Jaron Lanier (Digital Maoism on Edge.o
Simplicity is really the word here. When something is simple and I don't mean just websites, anyone can use it. People immediately feel comfortable and want to use it again because they didn't have to extend much effort. Websites are like that. If a person has to extend a lot of effort to find things, then the site becomes annoying to use. I think this is why Google blew Yahoo away when it was introduced, because Google is simple yet powerful at the same time. Anyone can use Google. Yahoo throws too much on their main page. There is probably 100 different links smashed together on one page. It's almost like you can't take it seriously. The site is over engineered. I think most people are annoyed at over engineered sites.
I remember reading a 'suprising' study that said people were more interested in the acessability of information on a website than the actual information itself. Well this is obvious, if you cant easily find the information you are looking for than the information is useless. Its not an issue of ugly or pretty its an issue of functionality. A buisness will spend all this money on a website designer and he will add all these useless features. I have a school website that tells me the weather for example. So now my page has to load some flash program that updates the temperature in real time. If i wanted to know the wetatehr i would go to a godamn weather site, or better yet look out my fucking window.
... he means to say "usable".
F*** Flash and everyone that rides in on it.
Any one else who finds that "Plenty of fish" web site not ugly at all?
... but for em the site looks quite normal und usefull. Absolutely nothing ugly about it.
Well might be my browser
angel'o'sphere
Cost free eBook I read (by iBook/Kobo/Amazon/ObookO/Gutenberg etc.): "The Green Odyssey" by Philip Jose Farmer.
If you're going to post that old chestnut, at least get it right! /. is, the lameness of the trolls, the same old jokes. Of course /. wouldn't be /. without it...
Funny how everyone bitches about how ugly