The Surprising Truth About "Ugly" Websites

Interesting article that was referenced by slashdot this morning, The Surprising Truth About Ugly Websites, about how sites that are "ugly" (the article writer's word) can make surprising amounts of money. He cites, among others, Ebay, Craigslist and IMDB as examples.

I'm not sure I'd describe websites like Craigslist and IMDB as "ugly." Rather, they are functional. Functional doesn't mean ugly. It just means a lack of gratuitious beauty.

I think one of the main reasons that simple, functional sites do well is that they are fast. Fast is really important. You want people to stay on your site all day, you'd better make it as fast as possible. People will tolerate slow page loads in a site they don't visit very often, like a corporation home page, but not in a website they spend hours on-a "soverign" site, to borrow Alan Cooper's term.

Back in the day, what slowed sites down were endless bitmaps, used to create nice backgrounds. With css, bitmaps aren't needed as much, but instead, we have complex css parsing for the browser to do. For example, this page (the Comet compose page) is 44k of html, but contains references to about seven external css files and twenty javascript. Even with the kind of caching a modern browser can do, that's still a hell of a lot of processing that has to occur. So when designing a web app, it's always important to think about whether the design is going to help the user get their task done, or is it just design for design's sake?