Web Design: Why You Should Have An Ugly Website
Posted: Wednesday, February 17, 2010
by Peter Brittain
Slinky Web Design
Look through the conventional wisdom of today in web design. Web hosting companies, and website customers, are inundated with tutorials and design galleries all devoted to making everything color-coordinated, shiny, glossy, glassy... and "Web 2.0" style!
Now, we're not going to say that *everybody* should follow our advice. Hardly! Instead, only a select few should follow this advice, because it takes a special kind of personality to make an ugly website thrive.
Digg is loud and clashing with green, blue, and yellow, Reddit is mostly light blue with sharp red and pink highlights, and Craigslist is dull gray with blue and red. Craigslist especially deserves honorable mention; their favicon is a purple peace sign (the sixties! yeah!) and when you go to the 'best of Craigslist' page you are greeted by a pure ASCII banner (the nineties! yeah!). Additionally, their logos are minimalist; Digg's mascot is a faceless stick-figure composed of boxes, the Reddit alien is a similar blog composed of ovals, and Craigslist just uses a bare font.
Yet all three of these sites are hugely successful. We could go on and on with examples: Wikipedia looks like somebody slapped together a prototype layout and stopped right there, BoingBoing uses a logo font that was apparently drawn in MS Paint and a pixelized mascot, and even Google's home search page is almost barren. And have you taken a look at the home page for your web hosting company lately?
This tells us some important lessons: If you have great content, nobody will care if your site design makes their eyes water. Sites that don't knock themselves out with superficial flash and glamor are saying, "We're all about the substance, not the style." In fact, you could draw a corollary between web sites and services with an ugly face and the engineering behind these sites. To make a car analogy, if your engine is getting 100 miles to the gallon and can do zero to sixty in a second, you'll drive it no matter what it looks like.
The important part of an ugly design is that it sticks in the mind. When you happen upon Craigslist, you immediately know that no other site on Earth looks exactly like this. Google's logos are so distinct, you can even pick a Google logo that just uses the colors without the letters. Each of these sites cashes in on brand name recognition, making themselves stand out in sharp contrast to the sea of look-alike sites on the web.
Seth Godin, a prominent marketing blogger, has also made a case for standing out. His own logo is a photo of the crown of his bald head (on a bright yellow background, yet) and his book covers are a symphony of bold primary colors together with jumbled styles and striking images. In his book "Purple Cow: Transform Your Business by Being Remarkable," he makes a case for standing out, clashing with the crowd, and daring to be different.
Like we said, not everybody should do this. A nonconformist style demands a nonconformist personality behind it to live up to the expectation. Just as celebrities accentuate their ugliest physical features as a kind of trademark, making yourself stand out in a noticeable way is a means to make your impression stick in the audience's mind for a good long time.
Peter Brittain is the owner of Perth Web Design company, Slinky Web Design in Western Australia. Peter also writes a great Web Design Blog .
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