Member-only story

Ugly websites sell better.

Web design is getting out of hand again.

Michal Malewicz
7 min readSep 3, 2024
Why ugly websites convert better

I’ve been in the web design business since 1998. It has gone through some phases, but the place its at right now feels the weirdest in a long time.

For years UX designers battled the “dribbblization” of the industry. What it means, is creating eye-candy projects and posing them as serious work.

Beautiful at first glance, but either impossible to code, or completely dysfunctional.

Form is taking over function. Again.

With animation tools and tutorials easily available, we get them animated too now. Here’s an example.

Animated parallax scrolling website

The problems with this design is high loading time (most people will click away), very vague and unconvincing copy and vertical animations that distract you from the main action.

It may look good, but it won’t work well. Or at all.

Understanding design

Let’s take a step back.

What is the role of a website? 99% of the time it’s to sell something. To get you to click a button.

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Michal Malewicz
Michal Malewicz

Written by Michal Malewicz

One design and one lifestyle story per week Redefine education at https://square.one → run https://squareblack.com → talk at https://youtube.com/MalewiczHype

Responses (137)

What are your thoughts?

I loved reading this because I'm a big function-over-form guy and while I like a pretty website, I'd rather it works, communicates the message, and does something meaningful. I'm not flashy at all when it comes to my work but everything should work…

176

I 100% agree that form follows function, and there are clear rules to follow to maximize conversions, but articles like this tend to downplay the importance of emotion in the purchase funnel- and focus only on the metrics.

There is a time and a…

158

What we have here is a parallax animation, moving clouds and a button that only shows up after 8 seconds. The whole thing also takes 31 seconds to load.

TL, DR: Don't do animations unless they really add an insane amount of value??
I see this in many agency websites as well: fancy stuff to show off, which makes it very hard for me as a client to figure out what the heck you actually do.
Also: what…

78