Ugly websites - and the reason why they make money 

I just stumbled upon the reason for a thing that I could not understand for years. A website does NOT NEED the best design. It is even contra-productive! Websites that have a very ugly design have one big advantage above the others. They SELL!

Convey Trust & Function Over Form

Mark Daoust writes in his article:

"...ugly websites do have the ability to present the perfect marketing message. What is that message?

You can trust us. We are a family run business and do not employ a marketing team. Our website is simple, but functional. Most importantly, our goal is to serve our customers, not necessarily learn HTML."

"As Internet professionals, we often forget that a large part of our society is actually afraid of the Internet."

And I do totally agree with him!

I am so happy now, that I started using the weird "brick wall background" ;-)

As example he gives the site

http://www.plentyoffish.com/

Really near No Design, but hey they are told to make $10,000 from Adsense. Per day!

The article can be found here
http://www.site-reference.com/articles/Website-Development/T...

via, thanks to cbrich.com for finding this one
http://www.cbrich.com/news/archive////the-surprising-truth-a...

Update 2010-01-22
Found this website design quite interesting:

Very simple from the HTML point of view to setup,
but it positions a very strong special branding
and makes it easy to remember.

http://newsic.de/