Great post from Seth Godwin:
"Pretty websites
...are rarely websites that convert as well as unpretty ones.
If the goal of your site is to position you, tell a story, establish your good taste and make it clear what sort of organization you are, then pretty might be the way to go. And you can measure the effectiveness of the site by how it impresses those you seek to impress, by its long-term impact.
But it's a mistake to also expect your pretty website to generate cash, to have the maximum percentage of clicks, to have the most efficient possible funnel of attention to action.
There's always been a conflict between the long-term benefits of beauty in commerce (in architecture, in advertising, in transactions) and the short-term brutality of measurement and direct response."
Full article: Pretty Websites
He does speak a lot of sense and it's an area I've always struggled on. Balancing cosmetics, functionality, calls to action and generating hard cash and conversions.
It took me a long time to realise (and I still don't understand) that sometimes a web page or a sales mail just works and doesn't need any tinkering or bells and whistles, regardless of how you think it looks. They distract, add noise and take attention from the primary objective, conversation/sale/lead.
I should probably add more adverts across the forum, but I genuinely dislike adsense, regardless how much revenue it brings in. A compromise is more adverts show for non members or if you aren't logged in, but they are still not too imposing (I think). So vanity over rules commercial sense.
But the hardest pages to optimise from a sales point of view has to be the home page. So little time to catch someones attention, make it blatantly obvious what you do, and have an obvious call to action to hook their attention and turn them into a lead/conversion/customer. We've experimented heavily over the years with things like split testing and have got to a formula that works for us. Personally I'd love to start afresh with a different design, but it's a huge risk when you have a working model, and I then fall into the playing trap.
How do you get on with your website? Are you prettier than your competition but your competition is more successful? Have you lost leads and sales after moving to a pretty website and regretting leaving your old unfashionable one?
Maybe you're a tinkerer and can't leave your site alone?
