Why Pretty Websites (Usually) Suck

Caid Christiansen• April, 20 2015

Marketing guru Seth Godin recently said on his blog that “pretty websites are rarely websites that convert as well as unpretty ones.” In his words, there’s a conflict between the long-term benefits of beauty in commerce, and the short-term brutality of measurement and response.

Whatever you happen to think of Seth, the point he makes here is a good one. Pretty websites suck. Usually.

Or perhaps we should say, websites designed only to be pretty suck. It’s difficult, but certainly possible, to have a website that looks great and gets results.

Designing a website with beauty as your only goal is a great way to shoot yourself in the foot right out of the gate. You might end up with a beautiful website, but if it’s not doing anything for you and your business, you have just that: a beautiful, and probably expensive, website that nobody knows about.

Designing a website with results in mind is a different story. That means getting your decision makers, salespeople, and marketers together and clearly defining what your goals are. Once you have those goals and know the results you’re looking for, it’s much easier to build out a website and figure out what matters.

The functions that are important for heavy equipment dealers are probably different than the functions that are important for strategy firms. What’s beautiful to each of those segments is probably different too.

That’s why the whole concept of pretty websites is a bit of a sham. For one, results should always come before aesthetics. A pretty website means little if it isn’t converting. What’s more, pretty means different things to different people. That website may not look pretty just for pretty’s sake, but if it hits on the right points for the right people, that’s all that matters.

Does all of this mean that you should set out from the beginning to have an ugly website? Absolutely not. What it does mean is that in almost all cases, it’s best to prioritize results first and worry about how the website is going to look later.