Drawar

A couple of thoughts come to mind here. Sometimes it's more a matter of who came to market first with a stable and functional product.

Zoomr may have a more robust feature set but they were far behind Flickr in launch and their numerous outages left many people high and dry when they wanted to access their content. Not exactly the way to woo users away from flickr.

I regularly push sites out that are rough around the edges because by watching the users activity I can see where things need to change. Once I see a decent user flow I'll involve a designer to create something that builds upon that rough skeleton and accentuate the users actions from activity tracking.

Given the choice of a highly functional site or one that looks like sugar, I'll take the functionality every time....especially for utility sites like del.icio.us where my time there will be limited.

Overall, I think the Web 2.0 world has gotten a lot better with how they place aesthetics on the importance scale.

Funny you say that, I asked in the irc chat earlier "when was web2.0 about the design, much less than it was how we deal with the transfer of information?"

I'm big on minimalism, but I'm even bigger on functionality (hence my note about page validation). I use this analogy when talking about next-gen video games and why I think the Wii will prevail ultimately: you look at such amazing games like Gears of War. Play them for a couple of days, and ultimately, the shock and awe over the awesome graphics wear off, and what are you left with? Just another video game. The geniuses behind the Wii recognized this and turned it into what it is.

It's the same with web sites. Once you become a loyal visitor to a website that looks incredible and flows amazingly between design and content, you get used to the awesome design and you start to look more at the information and content within. What you're left with then is just another website.

So for me, functionality and content 110%

About the ugly business card: Very, very often. I've honestly skipped over ads and Google search results when looking for a service because I felt that they were cheap and put absolutely no money into design. Microsoft Word, Front Page, and Publisher just don't cut it in my book.

People care about function more than beauty. It's always been that way and I doubt it will change. If Mahalo doesn't perform as well as as what people are currently using, the crowd will move on no matter how pretty it is.

In a bit of serendipity, I'm sitting on an unpublished post about the attractiveness of a weblog. Started when I read an article about how more attractive people are less likely to be found guilty than ugly ones. From there I started to read about attractiveness in hiring practices. Numerous studies have shown that attractive people make more than their homely counterparts. Same holds true for studies on students. Attractive students tend to get more attention, and higher evaluations than ugly peers.

Setting aside standards of beauty, which change with time and culture, I do think aesthetics trump function/substance initially. It may be a spit second decision, but people tend to gravitate towards what they find pleasing to the eye. As it relates to weblogs or web design, I think you're playing catch up if you don't create something attractive out of the box.

Nonetheless, I'll agree with Tyme. I think over time people care more about function/substance. You could be the most attractive design, but if behind it all is a vacuous dolt people will stop caring and drift elsewhere to get their needs met. I think attractiveness can get you attention initially, and is an important consideration. I don't think it will maintain the attention.

I think some people/company's just don't know the value and usefulness of a good visual design. It may also be the case, like you mentioned, that it's programmers trying to be designers.........in other words, they know how to use photoshop but don't know any design principles.

I agree with Tyme in agreeing with functionality being the important factor over time, however, don't you also want to turn visitors into users? First impressions mean a lot, and a strong visual presence might be a great way on first glance.

To me, aesthetics on the web comes in two parts.

A well designed, great looking, but usable and valid (etc...) but won't be recognized by the big CSS galleries, and the "CSS Remix" style of awesome colour pallets, maybe an illustration or two, good use of gradients and drop shadows, etc... The "CSS Remix" style is an easy one to replicate.

When presented with the option, most clients go the former route. A design that gets featured all over the web for it's originality and aesthetic force doesn't suit everyone, or every company.

But aesthetics still matter, or at least to me. If it all starts on a blank canvas in Photoshop (or whatever), then why not make it look good?

Here is an example: Twittergram. Dave basically built it in the open, it's functional(?), and he's testing it.

The site is not pleasing to the eye but I bet it will get a lot of use for those who are into audio and Twitter.

It matters to me — but functionality is a prerequisite. I absolutely adore Magnolia's design and logo, but unfortunately I'd already gotten attached to Del.icio.us when I found Magnolia.

Then there are sites with neither functionality nor aesthetics — like MySpace. I've got absolutely no idea how they become (and stay!) popular.

To answer your question, yeah, I think people don't put higher values on aesthetics because they're time consuming and expensive. Simplicity means more money for your startup to spend on features and stability. That'd be my guess, at least.

hthth, to me, why MySpace can retain so much popularity is because why would a bunch of teenage, IE using, constantly socializing kids need otherwise? To them the functionality is there, and the design doesn't matter because they have their own, yellow on purple, 8pt pixel font, widget filled design.

Who needs web developers any ways? IE is where the Alexa's at ;)

Depends on the audience.

We've ran dozens of a/b split tests for a particular app to gauge impact on conversion rate when you improve the design. Specific interface enhancements always win. Aesthetic enhancements alone never do.

It's frustrating. But that particular app doesn't target heavy web users. Aesthetics are extremely important to me.

While I agree with you for the most part, I do think it's a good thing that functionality matters. As a designer, I've seen many sites that are beautiful to look at, but they don't have any other purpose. It's frustrating sometimes to see such a brilliant design being used on a blog that hasn't been updated since the layout was put up.

As a Web designer, I'd like to think that aesthetics are quite important, but certainly second place to design (layout, usability, info architecture).

However...

As an artist, I'd like to make something beautiful and crazy and mindblowing.

I think that much of what is pleasing aesthetically is just not as easy to use, and in the end people will choose a busted up old Subaru that can get them from point A to point B reliably over the latest Porsche where the dashboard is so full of beautiful flashing features that the user forgot where he was supposed to put the key in again.

As in everything, a good balance is key. I do like Magnolia's look though.

I've been looking for jobs in Web Design / Web Development. And what I can definitely say is that from the offers that caught my eye, there is definitely a market for designers. And having a good design has never been as valuable as it is now.

Certainly, a great web developer using an XPTO Content Management System can download a great theme, customize the header a little bit and have a decent looking website.

But for me the sites that really stand out are those that choose to take their own approach and make the design fit the content, and not the other way around.

There is no "golden number" when it comes to web design, unless you're talking about proportions. For each site, and each customer, we need to take a different approach.

I don't think that the "don't judge a book by it's cover" can be applied very well when you're talking about the web. I have yet to encounter a great looking website with very disappointing content, but finding an ugly website with terrible content is very common.

Just browse any 9rules, or 9rules-related, blog and you'll understand what I'm talking about.

I think that in order to draw people's attention, you need good design, if you dont have that people are often confused, therefore they opt for finding an alternative, and then competence surges, I personally prefer Yahoo! to google, I like google's minimalist design, but Yahoo!'s page is very, very, useful.
And what you said about MySpace, youre right until some point, it is somewhat ugly, but only if you dont know how to work with it.
What they did was allow for people to design their profiles, so they didnt have to, with this killing two birds with one stone:

-Everybody is happy with the design
-They dont have to worry about people not liking it.

Just my two cents.

It's true that some things just succeed incredibly well despite the crappy design. Craigslist and MySpace are two good examples. The reason is that they're good ideas. Sure, design will attract people and make the experience of using the product pleasant, but the good idea is the main thing that and keeps them there.

I think ma.gnolia is a great example of both - awesome design and a good idea. The reason they're not as big as del.icio.us is that del.icio.us was first. If i were to use a bookmarking service, I'd totally choose ma.gnolia, the site is beautiful. Another example is Virb - often described as MySpace but it works better and doesn't look like crap. I'm on virb for that reason. If it was myspace or nothing, I'd gladly choose nothing.

I think that the most difficult aspect of designing for the web is that you are presenting information to everyone - not just the targeted demographic that you would hand your business card to.

With social networking sites (myspace, digg, stumbleupon), it's easy for web content and design to move quickly throughout the web.

Also, I think that all of us are sensitive to bandwidth constraints imposed by web hosting services. Making things pretty can be expensive.