Beautiful vs ugly website, never ending story
It’s a life long argument on whether to build a beautiful website or keep it simple and ‘ugly’.
I am the kind of webmaster that believes in KISS, Keep It Simple and Stupid. Well KISS can still be beautiful but for a below average artistic person like me, it’s not easy to build a simple but beautiful template.
A beautiful website have the edge of getting mentioned by the press, forums or other blogs, but it doesn’t has any advantage in terms of search engine traffic. Beautiful website can probably keep a bit more of repeat visitors compared to an ugly one.
But it’s a general believe that ugly website makes more money, because it can integrate ads here and there without thinking too much, and thus probably provide better results in getting ads exposure.
The argument of beautiful vs ugly website is still going on and on because there are no direct research methods that can compare both of them.
So far I am using simple templates for all of my websites, similar to this webmaster blog, and it has been working fine. My visitors seem happy with the design, simple and easy.
Perhaps I might consider hiring designers to overhaul my blog design later, but at the current moment, I’ll focus on building contents and generating traffic instead.