A Beautiful Website Can Be Worth Nothing, and a Plain One Can Be Worth a Great Deal
Owners who have been sold a disappointing website describe it in almost identical words. It looks lovely. Everyone says so. It has not brought in a single booking.
What makes this confusing is that the site did what was asked of it. The brief was that it should look modern and professional, and it does. Nobody wrote down what it was supposed to make happen, so nobody built that part.
What you actually bought
You bought a look, at a moment when you needed a job done. The home page opens with a photograph that fades slowly into another photograph, under the words “Welcome to our website”. There is a paragraph about passion and commitment. Somewhere below all of that, on the third screen down, is the thing a visitor came for.
Nobody is going to find it. The visitor on a phone with a weak signal gave up while the second photograph was still loading.
The plain site that beats it
A plumber in Bellville has one page. It says what he does, which suburbs he covers, what the call-out costs, and that he answers his phone. The number is a link that dials when you tap it. The form has four fields. The typeface is whatever came with the template.
It is not a handsome page. It works, because every element on it is doing a job, and because nothing is standing between the visitor and the two things they wanted: a price and a way to get hold of him.
Beauty is not the problem
This is not an argument for ugly websites. Good design does real commercial work. A guesthouse lives or dies on whether its rooms look like somewhere you would want to sleep, and that takes a photographer and a designer who knows how to place the photographs. A restaurant’s food photography is not decoration, it is the menu doing its job before anyone arrives.
The failure is decoration that pushes the work down the page. When the design and the job disagree, the job should win, and on most disappointing websites it is the other way round and nobody noticed.
How to tell which one you have
Go through your site page by page. For each page, write one sentence saying what you want the visitor to do there. Book a table. See the rate. Ask for a quote on a geyser. Find out whether you take their medical aid.
Then look at how far down the page that thing sits, and how many words stand in front of it. If you cannot write the sentence at all, you have found a page that exists for the sake of having a page, and it is costing you attention that the rest of the site needed.
Where the money went
Budgets drift towards whoever is most interested in the website, and that is almost never the customer. So the money goes on an animated header, a custom slider nobody scrolls, a video that eats a visitor’s mobile data before it has said anything.
Meanwhile nobody wrote the four sentences that answer whether you are open on a Sunday, what a standard job costs, how long it takes, and what happens if something goes wrong. Those sentences are free. They are also the ones that turn a visitor into a customer.
A slow page is a design decision as well
Weight is invisible in the studio, where everything is on fibre and nothing is being paid for by the megabyte. It is extremely visible to a customer standing in a parking area on a phone, deciding whether to wait for your header video to load.
In South Africa a meaningful share of your visitors are on mobile data they bought in advance. A home page that costs them ten megabytes to look at is asking them to spend money to be marketed to. They will not phrase it that way. They will simply leave, and the analytics will record a bounce that nobody can explain.
What “professional” actually means to a customer
Owners usually mean polished when they say professional. Customers mean something closer to real. A street address that exists. Photographs of the actual premises not a stock image of a different country’s kitchen. The names of the people who will be doing the work. A phone number that somebody answers.
These are the things that make a stranger willing to send money or let somebody into their house, and none of them require a designer. A plain page carrying all four is more persuasive than a handsome page carrying none, which is the whole argument in one sentence.
What to ask the next person who quotes you
Four questions will tell you most of what you need to know about whoever is about to build your site. What is each page for. What does a visitor do on it. How will we know in three months whether it worked. And what happens to somebody who fills in the form at ten at night.
If the answers are entirely about look and feel, you are being quoted for a brochure. A brochure is a legitimate thing to buy, as long as you know that is what you are paying for.
The takeaway
Judge your website the way you judge a member of staff. What did it do this month, and could you tell if it stopped doing it?
Amysa builds sites that are held to that standard, which sometimes means arguing for a plainer page than the one an owner had pictured. A site that looks good and works is the goal. A site that only looks good is the expensive version of a leaflet.
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Related field notes
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