Say you’re searching the web one day and you come across a truly beautiful website. The image is striking, the copy inspirational, the design meticulous. You could frame the thing and hang it above your couch. Are you likely to click and buy whatever that page is selling?
Not according to veteran designer and author Michal Malewicz, who has been designing websites for companies large and small for more than 20 years.
Thanks to an explosion of image generators and other fancy new tools, the web has recently become chock-full of extremely pretty websites that do a terrible job of actually selling anything, he argued on Medium recently.
He and other experts insist that it’s the latest AI-fuelled version of a problem as old as the web – business owners wasting tremendous amounts of money on ineffective but beautiful websites. And any entrepreneur who actually wants to make money should be warned.
Wasting money on fancy homepages is an Internet tradition
Bad homepages are, of course, nothing new. Elena Verna, a startup veteran who worked in growth roles at companies like SurveyMonkey and Dropbox for 15 years before becoming an entrepreneur herself, has written about this problem in her newsletter, Elena’s Growth Scoop.
Over the course of her career, she has seen more than her fair share of failed homepage redesigns. “What usually happens?” writes Verna. “A multi-month effort ensues, involving everyone and their mother’s opinions, and the result often doesn’t fail to lift sign-ups – it can crash them.”
The problem, she explains, is two-fold. One, many potential customers make up their mind about a purchase long before they go Googling homepages, meaning the expense and effort of these huge redesign projects often fails to move any meaningful needle.
But also, when companies redesign their website they generally want to make them more beautiful and fancy-looking. Verna’s word for this is “aspirational”, and she claims it rarely works out. Nice-looking words and images usually just end up confusing those looking to make a purchase.
Across the many, many redesigns Verna has encountered, “I’ve never seen one that had a major positive impact,” she says.
Why the problem is worse now
All of which is a long-winded way to confirm that businesses have been wasting money on bad homepage designs basically since there were homepages to design. But according to Malewicz’s detailed Medium post, the problem is more acute these days for two reasons: technology and design trends.
Like Verna, he too has observed that business owners have long fallen into the trap of prioritising good looks over results.
“When making websites for clients, we may think they want to get as many sales as possible. After 25 years of doing that, I can assure you it’s mostly not the case,” he writes. “Regular people treat design as close to art. They want a pretty painting on their domain most of the time.”
The job of the designer is, in part, to talk them out of “just pretty” in favour of effective and pretty. But recently, many designers have been seduced by a new rage for artistic, inspirational, and animated homepages and forgotten this basic truth.
“Currently we see a trend of pretty images merged with mediocre UI exploding on social media,” cautions Malewicz.
He signals out a few particular examples for constructive criticism in his post. But the bottom line for business owners is a simple warning.
Devoting a lot of time and money to creating a more eye-catching website has always been seductive – it seems like such a straightforward way to grow your business. And it’s even more seductive with all the fancy new tools designers have to play with at the moment.
But if you care about results more than artistic merit, it’s also almost sure to disappoint. Pretty is nice, but function needs to come before form. – Inc./Tribune News Service
