Why Are Web Pages So Ugly?

February 8, 2010 by David Olsen

I was thinking about the Reader’s Choice Awards and specifically the Best Web Designs participants when one of my friends was complaining that some of the nominees were (in his words) “downright ugly”. He wondered why, when there were so many good looking sites on the Web, ugly ones seem to get more prominence. So I asked him who he nominated for each of my design categories. And he laughed and said “well, I couldn’t think of any for all of them.” And I began to wonder, are beautiful Web pages more or less common on the Web than their ugly brethren? So I devised this completely unscientific test. I went to a random word generator and had it generate 10 words for me. I then went to Google and input those words one at a time into the search engine. I clicked “I’m feeling lucky” to get the first result for that search term. I decided ahead of time that if I got any About.com sites (I didn’t, by the way), I would get a new word – as no matter what I think about About.com sites beauty or lack thereof, my opinion is biased because I work for them. I also decided to only accept one page from any given site, so if a site came up for more than one word, I went back to the word generator and asked for another (this happened three times). Once I had my 10 sites I evaluated them based on principles of design and my own aesthetic. The results are as you see them in my article Why Are Web Pages So Ugly? As you might guess, none of the pages were something I would really consider good looking, although a couple were okay. Most were downright ugly, and one was almost frighteningly ugly.

Bad Web Design

Why Are Web Pages So Ugly? originally appeared on About.com Web Design / HTML on Monday, February 8th, 2010 at 08:53:37.

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