Appropriate Site Design -- PlentyofFish.com
I blogged about appropriate site design a couple of weeks ago, and I'm thinking about it even more now after finding a link from Slashdot to an article called The Surprising Truth About Ugly Websites.
The bottom line is that having a website that looks good is fine, but if it doesn't work the way people want it to, they won't care how good it looks. I think Daoust over-emphasizes the importance of design simplicity, particularly in the case of Google -- sure, it helped that Google's design was clean and simple, especially when compared to AltaVista and other popular search engine/portals of the time, but Google got popular because it worked. Users got useful, relevant results quickly. That's what webmasters have to keep in mind. Why are people visiting your site? Does your design make it easy for them to do what they want to do? If not, it doesn't matter how great your site looks.
But apart from all that, I'm looking at the example site given in the article, PlentyofFish.com. It's a free dating site and in the 5 minutes I spend looking around, it does seem easy to use. According to the site stats displayed, there were over 35,000 simultaneous visitors when I was there earlier. Now there are over 18,000. They get over 600,000 visitors a day. Those are some pretty damned impressive numbers. No wonder they're making so much from Adsense.
But why is the site so popular? I think it's because it's 1) free; 2) easy to use and fill a genuine need; 3) ugly. Except I don't think it's particularly ugly. But it does avoid the slick professional look that most big dating sites have. And I think that appeals to a lot of people. It feels less like a dating site and more like a place where they can hang out, even if the main purpose of hanging out is for meeting people. And because the thing is free, they don't feel like they're customers. It also means they're not prodcuts being bought and sold. They're just people using a website to find and meet other people. In other words, they don't feel like they're being marketed, or marketed to.
And the main thing is that the site design doesn't interfere with its purpose. People come to the site to look for and meet other people, and that's what takes up most of the main page. It's an ad-supported site but the ads don't dominate. As several people pointed out in the forum discussion about the article, PlentyofFish.com has a great Alexa rating because of all the traffic, but it's Google PR is only average, and it barely makes it in the top 50 results for "dating" (but #3 for "free dating") at Google. There's not a whole lot of SEO going on with the site because SEO does nothing to help their members use the site.
The bottom line is that having a website that looks good is fine, but if it doesn't work the way people want it to, they won't care how good it looks. I think Daoust over-emphasizes the importance of design simplicity, particularly in the case of Google -- sure, it helped that Google's design was clean and simple, especially when compared to AltaVista and other popular search engine/portals of the time, but Google got popular because it worked. Users got useful, relevant results quickly. That's what webmasters have to keep in mind. Why are people visiting your site? Does your design make it easy for them to do what they want to do? If not, it doesn't matter how great your site looks.
But apart from all that, I'm looking at the example site given in the article, PlentyofFish.com. It's a free dating site and in the 5 minutes I spend looking around, it does seem easy to use. According to the site stats displayed, there were over 35,000 simultaneous visitors when I was there earlier. Now there are over 18,000. They get over 600,000 visitors a day. Those are some pretty damned impressive numbers. No wonder they're making so much from Adsense.
But why is the site so popular? I think it's because it's 1) free; 2) easy to use and fill a genuine need; 3) ugly. Except I don't think it's particularly ugly. But it does avoid the slick professional look that most big dating sites have. And I think that appeals to a lot of people. It feels less like a dating site and more like a place where they can hang out, even if the main purpose of hanging out is for meeting people. And because the thing is free, they don't feel like they're customers. It also means they're not prodcuts being bought and sold. They're just people using a website to find and meet other people. In other words, they don't feel like they're being marketed, or marketed to.
And the main thing is that the site design doesn't interfere with its purpose. People come to the site to look for and meet other people, and that's what takes up most of the main page. It's an ad-supported site but the ads don't dominate. As several people pointed out in the forum discussion about the article, PlentyofFish.com has a great Alexa rating because of all the traffic, but it's Google PR is only average, and it barely makes it in the top 50 results for "dating" (but #3 for "free dating") at Google. There's not a whole lot of SEO going on with the site because SEO does nothing to help their members use the site.
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