You are correct, in some niches ugly sites will actually sell more than nice looking sites. However, when your niche has more tech savvy customers they are less likely to trust someone with an ugly site over a nice looking site.

But then it isn’t as all his traffic is from the search engines anyway.

@ Dan: Yes, judging is perhaps too easy for us humans. We do it on autopilot. Maybe it is an ingrown thing. Content is really what matters most.

Like we look past somebody’s appearance and within we find the most beautiful person.

@ George: From a marketing standpoint it is good to know what people think. That is why it helps to understand human psychology to become a really top marketer.

As for your ugly site comment not making as many sales; over the course of being online I have seen many sites of whom I know they make killer sales and they were butt ugly. I think it depends on the niche they are marketed in too as you said, so it can work too.

There are many sites with ugly designs that have great content. Those sites would do much better if they had pretty designs. It’s a fact that should not be ignored if you care about retaining your traffic.

I used to click away from ugly blogs thinking that they couldn’t possibly teach me anything. But I have learned that some of the best information comes from “ugly” blogs so I never click away without reading a bit first.

Most of my blogs are ugly and I don’t have a high amount of RSS subscribers on any of them because of this. But I don’t care because I know I provide useful information and I still get plenty of visitors from search engines.

Look at Griz’s blog. It’s one of the ugliest out there but it also provides more useful money making information by itself than 50 other MMO blogs do put together.