Photo by: Sektordua Remember High School? Do you remember the Homecoming Dance, Class President, and Prom? Who won those events? If your school was like mine, it was the most popular boy and girl wearing the crowns/winning the office. In many ways, the web is like High School! Similar rules apply. The ok at how. This realization came to me while I was working with a local company to assist them in their Search Engine Optimization (SEO) efforts. In their industry, there are thousands of companies on the web. Typing in their company name alone will generate over 2 million pages returned in Google. Yahoo and other engines return similar numbers. So think of the web as a high school with billions of students, and within your industry is like the High School clicks, with millions of students/pages.

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In a previous article, I asked, does your website look good? And if it (your website looking good) actually mattered?

Pop Quiz – did anyone go out an try to find a “pretty” website? Just curious.

If I had asked you to think of an ugly site, you could have probably come up with several examples easily. You might not be able to explain why they were ugly, but you could come up with them. People find it easier to remember bad things than good things.

Your site’s design shouldn’t be recognizable.

The fact of the matter is, if you easily recognized a website as being attractive, it actually broke one of the most important rules of design. The underlying rule is that design shouldn’t get in the way! Call it the form-over-function/function-over-form argument.

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