I just stumbled upon the reason for a thing that I could not understand for years. A website does NOT NEED the best design. It is even contra-productive! Websites that have a very ugly design have one big advantage above the others. They SELL!
Convey Trust & Function Over Form
Mark Daoust writes in his article:
"...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."
And I do totally agree with him!
I am so happy now, that I started using the weird "brick wall background" ;-)
As example he gives the site
Really near No Design, but hey they are told to make $10,000 from Adsense. Per day!
The article can be found here
http://www.site-reference.com/articles/Website-Development/T...
via, thanks to cbrich.com for finding this one
http://www.cbrich.com/news/archive////the-surprising-truth-a...
Update 2010-01-22
Found this website design quite interesting:
Very simple from the HTML point of view to setup,
but it positions a very strong special branding
and makes it easy to remember.
