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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."
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.
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)
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.
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?
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.
I beg to differ. Craigslist is decidedly *not* horrific design. It is a very simple 5-column layout like you might find on, oh, a newspaper classified page. This is a familiar format to most people. The use of color is very plain and very simple, namely: blue = a link. There's a spot of red for emphasis, and yellow for the same purpose. The meaning of each column and each subcolumn is abundantly clear. There's quite a bit of text on the page, but there are sufficient margins and padding to keep it readible (and the san-serif font helps).
There's nothing horrific about this design. Actually, it is quite functional -- a fact you appear to be aware of while ignoring the fact that, for the purposes of Craigslist, functionality is what good design is all about. And if you think nobody gave this any serious thought, you are a dolt.
This gets to the heart of what I find annoying about many Slashdotters: there's a shared opinion here that design is something that is done solely for aesthetic purposes, and that designers are by nature too wrapped up in pretty pictures to do anything worthwhile. In fact, nothing could be further from the truth. Design is about enhancing the strengths of any material, and while those strengths are often informational, this is not always true. I don't think anyone would argue that Myst would be a better game if the developers had stripped out all the graphics, just as no one would argue that Craigslist would be improved by the addition of a bunch of images.
Take a look at the world around you some time. If you live in a city, almost everything you come into contact with every day was touched upon at some point by a designer. That's not to say there's no bad design out there, but until you become aware of the designed-ness of your environment, it is far to easy to assume that "bad" is dominant.
// This is not a sig.
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.
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:)
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?
consider the Tower of Pisa . . .
.or Notre Dame Cathedral. . .
A very simple arrangement of functional repeated elements, although each element is ornamented, with a degree of taste.
. .
Gothic means "ugly." Ironically the term was coined by the baroque.
Which building is "better" -- the Empire State or the Chrysler?
A Cape Cod Salt Box.
Unless you know what you're doing, less is more.
Conversely, if you really know what you're doing less is the most. Scandinavian Modern is simple and elegant, it is also cold and lifeless. In a word, inhuman.
Shaker is simple and elegant and yet the spiritual inspiration comes through in every simple line. Traditional Japanese archtecture and furniture is so simple you can hardly even see it, but it goes past the mere spiritual to the sublime. If your posts, beams and plain white walls are themselves inherently beautiful extraneous ornament can only detract, not add.
During The Depression, Lee Wulff, the inventor of the fishing vest, sought to support himself by tying trout flies. He noted that he caught about 90% of his trout with a simple bit of fuzzy grey wool wrapped around the hook. He figured he could sell a lot of these, because he could sell these most effective, but most simple and inexpensive to make, flies for half the price of the fancy flies available in the stores.
But he found he couldn't sell them until he had doubled the price and added a bit of tinsel to catch fishermen.
Despite the fact that it was the simple mind of the trout that determined what was attractive, literally, and they had no sense of fashion.
KFG