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An industry design veteran who has successfully conquered both coasts, Drew Stauffer combines innovation with web standards to bring a blend of usability and creative vision to every project. As Director of Development for Wildfire Productions and CEO of Alibi Productions, Drew leaves no development stone unturned. He has published many articles on web standards and has been featured on WebProNews and Google News, and his companies count The Hyatt, BMW, and Michelin among their many satisfied clients.
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Ugly websites that work
Posted on Monday, May 01, 2006
I’ve seen a lot of articles lately about why ugly sites are getting so much traffic. Some of these sites include Craig’s List and Plenty of Fish. These sites aren’t attractive, but they are getting traffic, why is that? Sites like Craig’s list are not design heavy at all. In fact it looks like they took the design budget and threw it out the window.
The fact is it’s easy, easy to use, easy to navigate, and easy to get out. At the end of the day it’s all about usability. These sites get the repeat traffic because they are easy to use. Users can become comfortable with a layout of a site. People use what works for them.
Can we meet in the middle?
It is our job as designers to make a content rich site look easy to use and navigate. Unfortunately some designers care more about the design elements instead of the purpose of the site. There is no reason why Craig’s List has to look like it was built with early 90’s HTML. Of course you could never convince them to change it since you don’t fix what ain’t broke. If future designers can take a piece of the usability pie and incorporate in some elegant design then it could be a match made in heaven.
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Yes, I have attended a seminar by Sean Roach who makes a lot online. About $11,000/month in ad publishing revenue and even more on other sites. He put up a 1 page website selling an ebook on how to carve a pumpkin and in 2004 that site earned about $16,000+ and in 2005, more than $25,000. And yes, his website design sucked, but really works. You can learn more from John Reese as well, and Nathan Johnson. And many SEO people who are also very good Internet Marketers like Greg Boser, Todd ‘Oilman’ and Shoemoney and more. Ugly sites get popular if usability is good. Beautiful websites with bad usability do not make the sale. Beautiful websites with high usability are the best! That is Web 2.0 concepts right there.
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