Does Look and Feel Matter for Small Business Websites?

Any time I buy a food product or supplement, I like it to be from a really nice looking site (or at least a really big site). I think it depends on the criticalness of the product. If i am buying a woven dog sweater, then honestly, I don't care what the site looks like; I might even accept the fact that I will get ripped off. However, on the other hand, if I were to buy something like protein powder, it would be important to me that the site looked good as it instills confidence that I won't be poisoned. In fact, I would rather buy from a larger, more expensive site than a clunkier, less expensive site.

Just my experience.

That being said, I am not so sure that limited CSS will necessarily make an interface less sophisticated. Your framework can include DIVs that dont need to get used. For instance, all container divs might also have a

<div class="gutter">

inside of it for extra spacing. The whole site can be wrapped in a div. Horizontal bands of areas can be wrapped in a div. While these don't need to be used, they can give more flexibility.

Bruce Tognazzini (http://www.asktog.com) had an interesting study at Usability 2006 which looked at three different furniture sites. One was nicely designed and slick. The second looks pretty crappy. The third was also crappy. He studied the profitability and effectiveness of the designs in selling furniture.

The twist was, site #1 was a discount site, and site #2 was a high end site. (mismatch of perceived quality) and the last was a discount site.

The most profitable (by alot) was the crappy #3 discount furniture. The reason was that the look MATCHED the perceived value of the furniture. People want expensive stuff to be on a slick looking site and cheap discount stuff to be on a plain ugly site.

In the users minds, fancy graphics cost more money than ugly graphics. Mental model is everything.

However, from a markup perspective, good markup with clean HTML is important for any look and feel. It helps tremendously with SEO and it also speeds up the delivery of the page. (Speed makes a difference in all cases, faster=better) Additionally, its much easier to change good html and maintain the site if the markup is clean and simple.

Regarding browser compatibility, it's a numbers game. It's just as important for a large company to support 5% of their market as it is for a small company to support 5% of their market. The total dollars are smaller, but the percentage of importance is the same. Any company NOT using google analytics (or equivalent) to monitor their site usage is silly. I think alot of sites out there have 10X too many pages based on traffic patterns.

My answer to the question is, "Using FrontPage is like using your cousin to video-tape your tv commercial. It might look good. But you might be causing some negative side-effects."

>> I wonder whether the exact look at feel is really worth the such a big multiple of the time it takes me to generate the entire custom, functional app.

I have cranked out hundreds of SMB sites of the years and I can honestly say: Most times not. The only person/people who really care are the clients. 99% of the time no one else gives a rats arse if it is pixel perfect. But Brian's point is valid.

However, a website is a reflection of the company. If it looks like crap, people (being people) will assume that the values of the company are reflected buy the design of their site.

It also depends on the situation. I work for a public sector management research and consulting company and image is EVERYTHING. It is a politically charged environment and people will use *any* excuse to discredit the findings of our company. That means the that our Q&A has to be IMPECCABLE and that includes our forward facing site. So in that respect. I would say yes.

Our intranet on the other hand looks like a horses arse design wise. Does it matter? Not really. It is a purely functional site/app. All people care about is that it works.

And another question for everyone who responded. Let's say we're working on $10k - $25k projects including consulting, design, graphics, programming, copy writing, training, deployment and the like for non trivial sites.

(a) How much of that would you put aside for design

(b) At those kind of price points, do you think the clients might get a BETTER looking website if you constrained the designers, giving them a standard HTML structure and an in-house CSS framework which still allowed them to set background, do nice round edges and the like but didn't allow them to totally customize the CSS.

My real question, is in this price range, does limiting the HTML/CSS they can use really affect their ability to pick an appropriate color scheme, create pleasing graphics, implement a nice looking layout, etc? I just see us wasting too much time fixing custom CSS when we find out that the CSS our designers give us break when a title or a product description or something is too long (bear in mind we're talking a couple of site templates plus twenty screen templates - each with a number of properties where the size of the content depends on the content entered). I'd love to standardize on simpler CSS so we spent more time on things that add more value to the client than a pixel perfect rendtion of something that was probably designed the way it was only because the designer didn't KNOW what is easy or hard in CSS when they put the comps together.

Thoughts?

@Brian,

Agreed 100%