Business Bricks

Do ugly websites sell more than pretty ones? There’s been a bit of chatter about the uglification of websites lately, specifically around this essay by Mark Daoust. My analysis? Anecdotally, yup - ugly websites probably do, on modal average, sell better than pretty ones. But that doesn’t say you should deliberately build an ugly website (even if you’re selling something cheap, a suggestion made by several commenters). Nope, people are mixing cause and correlation. This is all amply explained, if you ask me, by some correlation between ugly websites and time and money constraints. Having no time and no money forces you to build an ugly but simple website. And simplification, not uglification, sells.