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.
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
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
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
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.
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)
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
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.
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.
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?
Good comment, better link: Maddox.
...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.
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
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".
In fact, that's how I do all of my posting.
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.
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.