Is Design Absolutely Necessary?

George, of www.glassdesignsbygeorgemcginn.com, writes:

Hi Jason,
I've been following the Sitemaps Google Group for a few weeks and saw you post today. I'm always looking for constructive comment so here is my website related to being a stained glass and woodworking artist. Sites been up for over 4 years now.

How to approach the review of your site has made me do a bit of thinking. Clearly, the purpose of your site is not to wow visitors into buying your handiwork, which by the way, is fantastic from the pictures on your site. You are not a designer and/or programmer, but you know enough to get your message onto the web without falling into the trap of placing every animated .gif and DHTML snippet you come across. Will people still be compelled to listen to your message and view/purchase your product due to your apparent genuineness (yep, it's a word) and skill in your craft, or be repelled by the site's lack of any sort of formatting and design?

Honestly, I don't know, but I'm leaning towards yes, they may still be compelled. Personally, if I were looking for a piece of hand-made art, I would trust a guy who looks like he's running the show himself and hasn't hired some fancy-pants designer and coder to build him some wonderfully dynamic and automated site that once they cash their checks they want to have nothing to do with it and leave him to mess up the site himself due to lack of design and/or code knowledge. In short, if I came across this site and was looking for this product, I would be inclined to purchase. On the other hand, some people may interpret the lack of professionalism of the website as a lack of professionalism in the company and be deterred. I know that I am occasionally guilty of discrediting a business simply because their site is ugly and/or poorly structured or coded. But then again, I'm a website snob.

Basically, the site may be so bad design-wise that it is good. Your site is laden with content, which is, of course, the most important part of any site, so people and search engines have something to chew on. Your code, while antiquated (HTML 3.2, holy crap), tentatively validates. I've never seen a site tentatively validate before, but heck, W3C doesn't seem to mind, so I guess neither should I, aside from the fact that I would suggest you upgrade to XHTML 1.0 Transitional (at least) to prevent your site from becoming completely obsolete in the future. Your page titles and metadata are all solid and relevant. I would create some sort of persistant and obvious navigation so the user does not have to constantly go back to the home page to reach other areas of the site, but structurally overall, this site is sound.

I could tell you that the site sucks because you have no design and people would agree with me, but that's not necessarily true (and they're superficial bastards). While I think that a bit of design would help, with what I can infer about your level of graphical design and HTML skill, I think you may end up making the site worse, unless you have it done professionally. There's nothing worse on the web than someone who thinks they know what they are doing and tries to act upon their untrained notions. Part of the beauty of your site is that you've accepted the fact that you're not a web designer, but rather an artist skilled in other arts.

If you're looking to increase business, hire someone to overhaul your site with a shopping cart and try to get people to link to you (according to Google, I may become your only incoming link). If business is good, you can't really afford to hire anyone, and an influx of business would be too much, aside from the minor tweaks mentioned above, I wouldn't change anything.