Ugly sells

Crappy websites, the ones coded by monkeys for adsense revenue, are the real “uglies [sic]” of the internet. They might look web 2.0, they might look like a Kindergartener had a fit and mashed keys, but they all share one thing in common. They serve no purpose. Consider a slick site with adsense garble, or a site coded by someone with a half-year education in being a human being. There are also the great examples of sites written randomly on mashed keyboards, and then spellchecked and thrown online, without any care or thought. The horrible grammar, the misspelled words, the asinine and insipid information, makes these sorts of sites the worst on the net. Many of them, are scarily, web 1.9 (meaning they look like 2.0, but were designed by random chance or bots). We don’t need more of this excrement from whatever darkest bowels of the internet to be made, and we certainly are not talking about them. Those sites need to be taken out back and put out of their misery by an eight gauge shotgun. It’s also scary how many of these MFAs (Made for Adsense) sites sell for enough to earn a living off of, and how little worth they are. Written for keywords, and for show, not for content and for a purpose! What is the point of having a website with a ton of articles that exhibit their keywords, and not their content? To make money off of ads! Less people will read these insipid entries though, as more people will be interested in real information and real content. They will return to those sites – not the ones made from cow pies.

The content, the actual meat, the very thing anyone goes to a site for, is and always will be king. If they cannot read it, they will not come. If they cannot navigate it, they will not click. If they cannot see it, they will not follow. If they cannot understand it, they will burn it. What is on the site, the very part that users want access to, whether it is services, manuals, ordering forms, articles, or other users, is certainly more important than anything else. If they cannot read it, they will not come. If they cannot order it, they will go elsewhere. If they cannot access it, they won’t buy. If they cannot understand it, they will not join. If they cannot print it, they will burn it. But if you build a site based on the principals of making it easy to see, use, navigate, and function, they will come. Of course you would need to take the steps to advertise it, but if your focus is on a niche that caters to anyone not born after 1990, drop the gloss and get the glue.

Ugly sites, they’re actually not that ugly when they start to beat out the shine, gloss, and glitter of the 2.0 revolution. They’re not that ugly when people go to them to buy or order services, and they certainly are not that ugly when they’re easy to read. It is not really ugly that “sells” you see, it is the services, the content, the ease, and the trust that you are dealing with a human that does.

The principal of keeping it simple is an old one. KISS, being, Keep It Simple, Stupid is a very easy acronym to remember. If you have a web 2.0 site that is complex, slick, shiny, but hard as heck to navigate because of small menus and buttons – you will lose out pretty quickly to Grandma’s Antiques store site that has massive buttons. Understanding your market demographic is just as important as letting folks navigate your site without a PHD in puzzles. If you’re selling goods or even if it’s a free membership site, and you cannot navigate it, you’re not likely to get many folks. Google is a good example of how simplicity wins out, when compared to the other big engines of search. They all focus on many things rather than searching – and have in the past compromised that exact function to focus on offering a huge complex array of other services. It is true that Google is also offering a bunch of tools – but when you go to Google, you still get greeted by that big ugly simple page that says “GOOGLE” and has a search bar. Go to Yahoo or MSN, and you get greeted with ever greater amounts of information – when all you may want to do is search the internet for something simple.