How much does the design factor matter when you do a website? I've seen plenty of sites with digusting or empty design but they are very popular anyway because of it's content. If only 45% of all my visitors that visit the first page, doesn't close the browser but also view other pages, how much can I increase if I take my site handlemistakes.com etc. toward 60% or 70%??
In my opinion it's more important for ecommerce websites (te get credibility) than for pure content websites, however I think it's not that hard to produce a not-ugly design and so I generally create an at least mediocre layout for every website I make.
I think good design is extremely important when you require money, because you need to be appear to be trustworthy to take peoples money, and therefore, professionalism is shown through the design. When was the last time you saw a bank website with a black tiled background with small, hard to read Gothic text and loads of gifs? At the same time, good design often needs to be balanced with good SEO, and free informative sites are normally better off concentrating on the content, as that's why the visitor is there, and SEs read content, not design. Having looked at your site, I spent about 20 seconds on it and didn't read single sentence. In my opinion, your text is too clumped up without enough paragraph indentations. Your header doesn't stand out enough, (the adsense box overshadows it too much) and it just doesn't look interesting. Having now read the first paragraph, I would suggest putting a really embarrasing image of someone making a mistake on the site, I'm sure there's loads. The colour also isn't perfect. You've got black header boxes on the left navigation panel, with blue navigation boxes down the center, and a primarily black image. I'd suggest keeping them all black, and making your main header stand out alot more with different colours and a better font.
I concur with the other opinions posted. With content sites, users are visiting you to simply get content. No investment is required on their part (money). However, when you're dealing with e-commerce, when you have individuals handing over their credit card number to you -- they look at every aspect of your site to verify its legitimacy.
I agree also with what has already been said. I would just like to add I noticed that 'handlemistakes' has obviously been designed on a very high res monitor because I had to scroll sideways on my 1024 display to see the whole page. It is generally agreed that forcing users to scroll sideways is not good design practice, so maybe that's something you should look at? T
I am a firm believer in designing sites small. You should not have to scroll up/down or sideways to look at anything even if you have small monitor. Having loads on one page can be confusing and unprofessional. If you have a specific page that needs to be large then fair enough but the home page should not have a huge amount of text on it.
Don't confuse ugliness with site usability. For example, MySpace is one of the ugliest social networking sites on the web -- its also the biggest and the only one that sold for half a billion dollars. I'm an artist/painter/graphic artists by nature. I can make designs that would blow you away. Instead I focus on designing sites that get users to do what I want them to do (or, make it easy for users to do what *they* want to do.)
I always tell advocates of flashy design to simply look at ebay.com. doesn't look particularly nice at all, yet it's a multi-billion dollar company.
eBay has always amazed me. I used to hate their design. It's slightly improved over the years, but it's still no drop-dead gorgeous site. Yet it's continuing to make money. I assume it's because of the content and the financial opportunities it affords its users. When I frist got on eBay about 6 years ago, I complained about the site's design to my wife, and she said it simply : "That's not why users go there".
Yup. Compare that to something where the market is rammed with competitors such as Adult Entertainment and Online Casinos and the site design quality is greatly increased, to stand out.