Introduction
Having an ugly website is a sin that often doesn’t go unpunished. The punishment involves getting mediocre results to bad publicity.
I recently designed this beautiful personal website: wasimapinjari.netlify.app and most people I have shown this to loved it. It feels great.
This made me wonder why I keep seeing horrendous websites now and then. Do these people don’t know what the cost of this is?
In this article, we are going to learn that and we are also going to see how to master the craft of making beautiful websites or any type of design.
A. Mindset
How Important Having A Beautiful Website Is?
Most programmers feel the task of making things look pretty is lame and it is not worth the hassle. I have mixed feelings about this. Imagine you visited a website and it looks extremely bad, outdated, and poorly designed. How likely are you going to visit it again?
And what if the website looks great but lacks content to keep you engaged or has terrible products and services that they're offering, then you probably are not going to visit it again either.
You may argue marketing is more important: what if the bad-looking website belongs to someone who has a big following? That bad-looking website may have more success than someone who is relying on good looks and content only because of the funnel the owner created.
A funnel is a concept in which you bring as many eyeballs as possible on whatever you're selling (including yourself) and there are going to be people who are going to click and potentially buy no matter what you're selling.
What I mean by selling is persuading someone to perform an action you want and buying is someone who takes the action you want. Someone saying I don’t buy that means they are unwilling to be persuaded by you or your words. They might communicate that non-verbally by simply ignoring you.
It may seem like it's probably okay to overlook website design then and just master the funnel and that's about it. I'm going to argue as you read on that this is a bad idea based on how decision-making in human beings works. I will get into the details later.
People judge a book by its cover, and a website's success can be amplified by just changing its appearance. It might be obvious that to achieve the heights of success you are better off optimizing everything by having a good-looking website along with mastering the funnel and having great content or products and services to offer.
Because people may get fooled into buying something but they are not going to stick around or keep buying if they don't have a great experience in the long term. And they're going to tell everyone about the bad experience to prevent others from going through that same experience.
Retention is the key. But before you retain you must acquire, to acquire you must attract attention.
Appearance is important because appearance creates an initial impression that a visitor has and on the basis of that he judges what type of experience he should expect from it. And once that initial impression is set it's often hard for people to change it even after they see contradicting pieces of evidence that should alter their initial impression.
Meaning a bad-looking website is going to set an expectation that content is going to be low-quality. But when someone reads the content and loves it. He feels dissonance and gets confused. He feels a need to be consistent with his initial impression and dismisses the good content as a fluke.
What Is More Convincing To You?
Someone saying they know how to design well or someone showing you a great portfolio of amazingly designed projects.
Visuals have the power to communicate things that words simply don't.
There is a technique in writing which goes by show, don't tell.
The whole idea is to paint a picture of what's happening and allow readers to imagine and experience the story instead of explicitly declaring it.
Instead of writing "Joe doesn't like the design" you write "Joe fumed and rip the design into pieces and threw it out of the window."
What Does A Beautiful Website Communicate Anyway?
You may feel like you're wasting your time looking at the clock annoyed thinking when this hellish work of tweaking little details is going to end as no one is going to care about it anyway. And they usually don't.
You can use beautiful templates instead if you don't want to create something custom. But some don't even bother to do that much.
What you don't realize here is that you've more to lose by not making that investment.
What Do You Lose?
Let's say you meet someone attractive for the first time and you don't know anything about them. Because they're attractive, that is going to hijack your brain and you're going to start assuming positive things about them like they are intelligent, kind, caring, and belong to a good household without any evidence that verifies those assumptions.
They might be dumb, mean, selfish, and belong to a terrible household, who knows?
What Just Happened?
When you see someone attractive their attractiveness creates a halo effect around them and this effect makes people idealize them.
A halo effect is a phenomenon in which people ascribe positive or negative attributes or qualities to someone or something based on superficial appearances.
By definition, the halo effect also works in the opposite direction where people get repulsed because something is unpleasant to their eyes and they start assuming negative things about the thing that repulsed them.
The sad part that most people don't like to hear is that if you feel the pull or repulsion to someone or something then you're probably not alone. People like to assume they are unbiased and logical so let them think that.
You're better off assuming you're a highly biased and emotional creature. You can get easily manipulated by appearances because it's threatening for you to assume what you see is fake and people and things are not open books that you can read every time. You must learn to look past appearances.
Don't expect someone to like something when even you don't like it, don't hope people are understanding. As we already established flowery words don't mean much if there are no flowers.
This means if your products and services are great, but your website is ugly people are going to assume your products and services suck.
Most won't even going to bother trying your content or products and services assuming it's going to be cheap and low-quality anyway.
They are less likely going to recommend it to others because that will mean they lack taste and good judgment.
They are going to assume a lack of authority and credibility based on looks.
Association is another powerful thing that you must be aware of where people assume negative or positive things about someone merely because of its association with someone or something positive or negative.
If you hang out with terrible people, you are terrible. That's what association looks like.
The reverse is true as well if your website looks great maybe your content is as well.
That's why making your website pretty is one of the best investments you can make that will pay dividends in the long run. Uglyness is a bad association to have.
What Is The Point Of Making A Website Look Pretty?
A pretty website increases the likelihood of getting the below things:
It will help you grow quickly because you stand out from the competition.
It will help you convey authority and credibility quickly.
Your visitors are going to expect your content to be good. They expect to get charged a premium price for your products and services. They're not going to be surprised by it. This is more important than it looks because if people feel unfairly treated they leave.
The eyes are the most powerful sense among all senses of the human body. If you manage to please them, then you will bypass most of the logic and suspicion people naturally have toward the unfamiliar.
A pretty website makes people comfortable since people want to associate themselves with something elevated and high-end. They want to feel pride in their choices.
A pretty website also conveys that you care and you've made sure to please the visitor's eyes with alluring visuals.
Your visitors will love recommending your website to others as it will make them seem cool in the eyes of others showing off their good taste. Thus setting off the viral effect.
It will command attention and help you solidify powerful branding.
People like to follow an expert authority on subject matters and a pretty website is going to help you communicate that authority indirectly and lower people's walls towards trying your products and services and help you gain their trust way faster.
How? A pretty website will help you create a halo effect. This means that just because your website looks cool people will automatically start associating positive attributes to it instantly without verifying it. They think a great-looking website has great things to offer.
It's just like when people see a successful person they tend to associate them with being competent, hardworking, smart, and high energy without even verifying their automatic assumptions because of the halo effect that surrounds them.
These people are sometimes aware of the effects they are having on others and they might be secretly terrified of ruining the halo effect themselves thinking you might not going to accept them once they take off the makeup or you realize they are not as charismatic, cool and funny as they pretended and in fact have a boring life that you won't want to be a part of.
A halo effect has only one problem that you may need to maintain it. A lack of halo effect is disenchantment. It's when fantasy collides with reality. When love turns into hate.
Sigmund Freud once said beauty has no obvious use; nor is there any clear cultural necessity for it. Yet civilization could not do without it.
The same applies to your website.
The halo effect primes people to expect a good experience with your website, it will also make them think your content or product and services are high-end if they decide to become a paying customer they expect to receive great customer service from you.
They will come thinking your products and services are expensive and get relieved if it's not that much. Instead of coming thinking it must be cheap and getting disappointed because it is too costly.
Dealing with expectations is a huge part of success. You must address them. As disappointment is expectations minus reality. You're better off exceeding those expectations with reality.
I do realize I am making a generalization here as if whatever I am saying applies to every single person who visits your website. This is not true. How about you view it as half of the people don't care as much?
Everything is an opinion and they are only better if hold loosely. You can't really put people in a category and predict them as they come from different experiences, cultures, genetic makeups, upbringings, values, temperaments, or whatever.
I am all about probabilities. My question is always to find out how to increase the odds of something happening.
Lastly, it might seem like we are manipulating people with visuals but the truth is we can't. Our focus is to attract them, keeping them requires giving them something they want and caring about their wants, needs, and desires.
Most people focus on how can I get something but the transaction occurs when we understand that to receive something we must give others what they might be looking for. Sometimes that requires empathy, other times common sense.
For example, if you're looking for an awesome partner then figure out what they might be looking for and then provide it. It may be as simple as becoming a dream partner yourself through personal improvement.
Solve your emotional problems, inspect yourself, and find a way to deal with your insecurities such that no one can push your buttons without your permission. Being emotionally secure with an epic lifestyle is alluring.
B. Getting Good At The Craft
1. Acquire Deep Design Knowledge:
Designing is an art form that needs special attention to detail.
There are 2 stages of learning: first is knowledge acquisition where you learn the rules of the games and once you master them, you enter the second stage where you learned enough that you can experiment and start breaking those rules and create something revolutionary and different from others thus setting off a new trend.
While making sure that it's not too strange that no one can relate and that's why you learn those rules in the first place, even if you're breaking them now.
In the design context, it means learning typography, color theory, designing based on the target audience, alignment, color balance, white spacing, etc.
2. Resist Your Urge To Suppress Your Authentic Self-Expression:
We all learn by copying others because most often what they are doing seems to work and it's self-evident as they manage to attract our eyes to them.
If it didn't work why would we pay any attention to them? Sometimes you learn what not to do as they managed to attract our negative attention.
Whatever way our attention goes at least we didn’t ignore them. On the other hand not learning from others can be fatal as we might put ourselves in dangerous situations or waste our valuable time, money, resources, and emotional investment.
That’s why people seek to be naïve followers and not leaders by taking initiative, failing, and often learning things the hard way which ultimately leads them to success or tremendous failure.
Leaders are held accountable for any mistakes, not followers and it's often better to judge and criticize than to be at the receiving end of that.
Despite all the perks of being a follower the glory and benefits belong to those who play in the field, not to those who are passive observers criticizing and judging them harshly.
Followers receive the vile satisfaction of feeling right and smart, nothing else.
I follow people who are smarter than me to learn from them or dumber than me for entertainment but there is a point where being a follower or passive consumer becomes toxic.
One day you wake up and realize your life is a mess and you wasted it. You probably know everything and have seen everything but that was a shallow experience and you never really experienced those things in your real life.
As Steve Jobs said while lecturing at University why he doesn't like consultants because they give recommendations and tell others to follow suit without ever being held accountable for any of those.
He compares that to someone who is proudly telling everyone how he has seen the different images of fruits without ever actually tasting them.
According to him one must bear responsibility for one's recommendations and deal with the scars of being wrong and pick himself up again.
So go ahead, create something, and get your hands dirty, you may make mistakes and those mistakes will pave the path to success as you eventually learn how to navigate through failure.
3. Be Bold In Your Designs By Assuring Yourself That Not Everyone Needs To Like Them:
Most people don’t like to be bold because they feel like they are exposing themselves to the unknown and need more data before they act. And they never act.
They get stuck into analysis paralysis and the opportunity passes before their eyes. They feel frustrated and anxiety-ridden. It is almost as if they entered into the state of the unknown which they fear by avoidance of the unknown.
They don't know when they will get the opportunity again or they might never get any, who knows the unknown?
Whenever designing, listen to your inner voice. Be bold with your art. Unknown needs to be explored not to be avoided. It's okay to design something wild and strange looking.
"How bold one gets when one is sure of being loved" - Sigmund Freud
4. Be Different:
It's okay to look at other people's designs and even copy them. We all are imperfect mirrors even if we copy someone we still manage to add our touch and create something completely different that doesn't look like a copy.
But some people take it too far. They feel like doing something else or adopting a completely new style but they shy away from it and feel like what others did is way better and then they go out of their way to change themselves to fit their design into a certain type of mold that the other person laid down for them or they themselves deem it to be perfect.
The problem with this approach is you create something that is already out there in the wild and there is nothing new about your design. It's not creative or some people like to say original.
What is original anyway? Everything is a remix. We mix and match some pieces from different places and call the weird combination original.
You are not running behind the original. What you're running behind is creating something unique something that hasn't been done before thus creating something original in an ironic way.
You create certain combinations that don't exist in the market that you bring to the table.
5. Refine By Seeking Feedback:
Seeking feedback is important because whenever we're working on something for a long time, we get emotionally attached to it and the more time we spend the harder the detachment becomes.
You might recall the time when you thought something looked stunning and after some months or even years, you look back and cringe and think to yourself: what I was doing?
I am probably going to cringe at this article and my flawed perspective after some time looking back, I might edit or even delete this article, who knows?
That's why you should show your work to others and seek feedback because they are viewing your work with complete emotional detachment. One reason why I showed you my website at the start.
You will have moments where you worked hard and other people think it's complete garbage. You telling them how hard you worked or the amount of time you spent doing something is not going to change their opinion. They might feel bad for you and that look on their face is only going to intensify your feelings of you're no good.
I once spend a month creating an animation in Adobe After Effects and then I excitedly showed it to one of my best friends. He responded by saying my animation looks clownish and he did like the ending portion of my animation which I spend the least time on.
His response felt like a kick in the stomach. As he uttered those words I frowned trying to maintain my composure. I resist my impulse to defend and I let the feedback land. I listen intently and let him know that I appreciate his honest feedback.
This brings us to our next concept: sunk cost fallacy.
This is a phenomenon in which someone is unwilling to accept a loss because they have made a significant investment in it, even after it is obvious the more they invest the greater the loss will be and it’s better to just let go.
You should aim to have no sunk cost. Once you know something is not working just move on. That doesn’t mean you don’t have patience. You realize good things take time, but you also realize when things are going south and no amount of money, time, resources, and emotional investment is going to fix the situation and you’re better off just quitting and starting something else. Insanity is doing the same thing over and over and expecting different results.
We all want a return on our investment and that doesn’t always mean you should invest more if you’re not getting any returns that you hoped for.
The emotional scars that come with loss might make you hesitant and vigilant with future investments. But human beings are naturally vulnerable and your closing off is going against your nature and that might be your true defeat.
Be careful with whom you decided to show your work, the larger the sample size the better. This means showing your work to as many people as possible and if those people are related to your field that is even better and if they are experts in your field then that's ideal.
Why experts? Because they can accurately tell you what's right and what's wrong. They have the vocabulary to describe the fine details that normal people don't possess.
They have experienced and seen enough things to know what to get impressed by and what to not. They have fine-tuned instincts and gut feelings they developed from experience and they can tell what is most likely going to be a hit and what is a flop. They don't need to be right all the time, but most of the time they are.
Normal people don't have wide experience and they won't even be able to tell you why they prefer something over something else. They may give you reasonable answers but those answers won't going to help you much. Because they don't know how to describe with correct words that they don't even know exist.
Larger sample sizes allow you to weed out fake reviews and get a general feeling for how your work is perceived by a mass audience.
People are bad at judging what's good and what's bad at the moment. If something is unfamiliar or outright strange they are going to respond negatively with harsh judgment and criticism, no matter how good your work is.
People love control, they surround themselves with what is familiar and banish what threatened their feeling of control which is often unfamiliar things. They hate change because it is anxiety-inducing and the illusion of loss of control is panicking.
Assume 50% won't like you and if that number becomes larger and larger then you may want to reconsider your work. The same feedback received continuously may be a sign something is truly wrong.
Or you may want to just go ahead and release the work just for fun. Because history is filled with work that wasn't considered favorably at the onset but as people get comfortable with newness, the work was proved to be a massive success.
The feedback is the tool that will help you stay in touch with reality. Forbidding you from creating something bizarre. It doesn't mean people always know what they want. They may sometimes need to make adjustments to realize the new thing is the future.
6. Never Reveal Half-Finished Work To Others:
You may want to take baby steps and seek feedback instantly, but sometimes it's hard for people to see the big picture, and getting judged on half-finished work is not fair.
You may want to complete a small project first and then seek feedback on completed work instead of spending months or years completing certain work and then seeking feedback.
You can do both as well: you may keep working on big side projects that you don't reveal and have mini projects ideally related to side projects that you're continuously seeking feedback on.
7. Resist Your Urge To Brag About How Hard You Worked:
When you're giving guidance to someone you may want to let them know that they need to work hard for their success.
You may want to be someone who shows them the correct path and help them understand that making money is hard in the beginning. It may be easy once they get skilled and have followers and connections.
But in the beginning, you let them know that it's going to be difficult before getting easy.
You help them manage their expectations to prevent them from getting discouraged and encourage them to work hard and get skilled to get what they want.
But in a general sense, nothing spoils the illusion of greatness more than bragging about how hard you work or the amount of time you invested in perfecting something.
You telling them about the time and work that goes into it will only raise questions in their mind as if you may not know what you are doing if it takes that much effort.
People love fantasy. Easy money is a fantasy that you spoil by making them realize nothing is as easy as it seems.
And nothing takes more work than making something look effortless. It is far better to let others do bragging for you. Let them acknowledge that you must have worked hard for your achievements and you thank them as if you can do more if you work harder.
That's the ultimate God flex.
Thanks for reading!
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Links: wasimapinjari.bio.link