I have been seeing a rash of poorly designed or just plain ugly web sites recently. One theory for it is that those that design them are just bad designers. Another is that they are good designers but don’t know how to put together a good site. The last is that design just doesn’t matter. Some people even think that the only important concept to consider when designing your site is search engine optimization.

Let’s take these on one at a time…

Bad designers exist. I, myself, am a good designer. I don’t consider myself a great designer, but I would give myself a good rating. My sites are clean, up to date, and are easy to manage and update. Some of my best work has been sites I have created from start to finish, including logos. The bottom line is: there is no excuse for using a bad designer. If you don’t know if someone is good or bad, find a friend or three and ask them what they think of the designer’s portfolio. If your friends don’t like the designs, don’t use the designer.

If you have a good designer who has done good logo work and good marketing work for you, keep them! They are not that easy to find. The only issue is this: they aren’t web designers, they are graphic designers. Occasionally you can find one person that is both, but generally a good graphic designer can do a website, but they aren’t really a web programmer. My suggestion in this case is keep your designer and find a programmer to compliment the designs and make you a good looking, functional, search engine friendly web site.

Next, let’s talk about whether or not design matters. My sarcastic remark is that web design doesn’t matter - in 1992. Anytime after 1992, design matters. In 1992 you could put up anything and it was marvelous, mostly because at the time there just wasn’t that much graphic content on the World Wide Web. If you live in the world of 2008, you need a smartly designed website. Why? Because it matters to your customers if your site is good looking or not.

What are your web surfing habits? How much credibility do you give to a web site that looks bad or is poorly designed? Do you want to buy products from sites that look terrible? How impressed are you at a professional that has a site that looks like this one: http://www.lanyardsupply.com

Lastly, the biggest myth is that it only matters what the search engines think about your website. Let’s just look at the logic behind that…

If you get 10 million individual visitors every day to your website and it is poorly designed, loads slowly, has irrelevant content, but mostly looks ugly, how many people do you think you’ll convert to customers? 1%? 2%? That is still really good conversion…Ok, so you convert 100,000 a day. Who gets those kind of numbers? No one.

Reality is that if your site is ugly, you won’t even convert 1%. And how much traffic does your site really have? 100 unique visitors a day? Maybe a thousand? If you can’t convert even 1% of those visitors, why do you have a web site? Even if your page is the number one ranking in Google for your specific key words, who cares if you can’t convert those clicks to customers?

At a minimum level you need to have a visually pleasing site. You should have a compelling offer so you can gather the name and email of your potential customers. You should have contact information on every page. But mostly, you need a site that is visually pleasing to at least half of the people that come to your site.