Neither beautiful nor usable

Seen the Review your Website page before?

Wondering what it is all about?

Wondering why it ever existed and was so ugly?

It was an experiment. I put the Review your Site page up to see whether it would be found, whether anyone would contact me, and whether anyone would actually pay me to criticise their site. I did it also because my time became incredibly crushed, and I simply was not blogging as often, but I wanted to let people know that I could help if they were serious about needing it.

Nothing happened

Perhaps I should have blogged it, but overall all I got were a few snarky comments about the overall website being poorly designed. (It’s a standard WordPress.com template otherwise)

The design of that page is meant to look poor – cheap even. It’s a ripoff from the world of ebook sales. Do go and check it out that murky world, as they are dominated by A/B testing and the resulting websites are ugly but effective.

It’s similar with many great sites – beauty is not equal to usability. The first impression of Trade Me for many people coming from overseas, including myself, is that it is simplistic, cartoonish – and not serious. After a while though we realise that it’s just simple to use, and deadly serious in staying simple to use  – and that’s why it gets used a lot.

Anyway – without further ado – the results:

The page had just 315 WordPress.com measured views since it went live on the 20th of May. That’s about the number of views this site gets on an average day when I do not post.

Nobody contacted me about the offer.

That’s less than I expected, but not unsurprising. I’m leaving the page up for a little while longer to make this blog post relevant, but basically the experiment is over.

It was neither beautiful nor usable.