Nobody is arguing for ugly websites
Most websites I get sent are fine. That’s the problem.
They look modern enough. The photography is decent. Somebody has clearly spent money. And then you ask the owner what the site actually does for them, and there’s a pause, and then something like “not much, really”.
That’s the gap this is about. Not ugly against pretty. Pretty against useful.
So let me give away the obvious objection first, because it’s a fair one. Aesthetics matter. A site that looks cheap makes you look cheap, and people decide whether you’re any good in about two seconds, mostly on how the thing looks. Nobody hires the plumber whose website looks like it was built in 2009, however good he is.
That’s real. It’s just not the whole job. A website that looks great and does nothing is still a website that does nothing.
Where pretty design usually comes from
There are two places, and neither of them is your customer.
The first is the agency. A striking site is a portfolio piece, and portfolio pieces win awards and bring in the next client. So the incentive is to make something that looks impressive to other designers. An agency gets paid whether your website works or not. I’ve never had that luxury, and it changes how you think about every decision on a page.
The second is the owner. You’ve spent money, you want to feel proud of it, and a site that looks expensive feels like a good outcome. Completely understandable. Also completely disconnected from whether anyone rings you.
Both of those are vanity, and vanity is expensive because it’s invisible. You don’t get a bill for the enquiries you never got.
The question that sorts it out
Point at anything on a page and ask what it’s for.
The full-width photo of a sunset. The animation on scroll. The rotating carousel of five headlines. The paragraph about your passion for excellence. What is each one doing to move someone closer to picking up the phone?
If the honest answer is “it looks nice”, you’ve found decoration.
Decoration isn’t automatically wrong. Some things are on a page purely to make it feel considered, and that has value, because feeling considered is part of feeling trustworthy. The rule isn’t that everything must be ruthlessly functional. The rule is that you should know which is which, and that decoration should never get in the way of the thing that actually earns.
Realistically, most sites fail that test on the first screen.
Conversion design is usually the simpler one
This is the bit people get wrong. They hear “conversion focused” and picture something loud, with big orange buttons and countdown timers.
It’s almost always the opposite. Conversion design is clean, because clutter costs you attention. It’s simple, because every extra choice is a chance to choose nothing. It says the thing you want understood in the plainest way it can, in the place people are actually looking.
The hard part isn’t adding. It’s taking away. Every element you remove makes the remaining ones louder, and most sites would convert better tomorrow if you deleted a third of what’s on them.
Now put a trade in front of it
Everything above gets a lot less abstract when the business is a real one with a van outside.
Someone landing on a trade website is asking three questions, and they’re asking them fast.
Who are you. What are you selling. Why should I pick you over the other three tabs I’ve got open.
That’s it. That’s the whole brief. Every single thing on that website is either helping answer one of those three questions or it’s in the way.
Who you are
Real photographs of real people, not stock images of a man in a hard hat pointing at a clipboard. A name. A face. A town. A company number if you’ve got one, because it’s checkable and most of your competitors won’t bother.
People aren’t after perfect. They’re after real, and real is what reads as trustworthy.
What you’re selling
Plain words, in the order people search for them. “Bathroom fitting in Whitstable” beats “bespoke sanctuary solutions” every time, and it isn’t close. If a visitor has to translate your website before they can work out whether you do the thing they need, you’ve already lost to someone clearer.
Why they should pick you
This is the one nearly everybody fumbles, because the instinct is to state it. Reliable. Professional. Twenty years of experience. Every competitor says exactly the same words, so the words are worth nothing.
Illustration of competence rather than statement of competence. Show the work. Photographs of the last six jobs beat any adjective you can write about yourself. Reviews where somebody will actually see them rather than buried on a page nobody clicks. The difficult job you took on and how it turned out.
The dentist and the tattoo studio
Here’s why “just make it look good” isn’t a brief.
A nervous dental patient wants reassurance. Calm, clean, clear, a phone number, and no surprises. Make that site cinematic and you’ve made an anxious person more anxious.
A tattoo studio is the opposite. That customer wants personality and proof of taste, and a safe corporate layout would actively put them off.
Same brief, opposite answers. The audience decides the aesthetic, not the designer’s mood board and not the owner’s favourite colour. Which is another way of saying that “pretty” isn’t even a fixed target. Pretty to who?
What this looks like in practice
On a trade site it’s fairly boring, and boring is fine.
The first screen says what you do and where you do it, with an obvious way to contact you. Your phone number is visible everywhere and tappable on a phone, because most of your visitors are on one. Photographs are of your actual work. Reviews sit near the thing they’re vouching for rather than in a graveyard page called Testimonials. There’s one clear action per page and it’s the same action all the way down.
None of that is clever. That’s rather the point. Clever is for the parts of the job the visitor never sees.
The belief you want them to leave with
If someone lands on your website, spends forty seconds, and leaves thinking “he knows his shit, he’s probably good”, the website has done its entire job.
That’s the whole objective. Not “what a beautiful site”. Not “great use of whitespace”. Just quiet confidence that you’re the right person to call, arrived at without them having to work for it.
Aesthetics are important. Conversion is king. Design everything in service of the second one and you’ll usually end up with the first anyway, because clarity is genuinely nice to look at.
If you want to see it rather than read about it
I’ll build you a homepage design for your business, free, and send it over within 48 hours. No card details, no meeting, and no obligation at the end of it. If you like it, sites are £79 a month with nothing to pay upfront. If you don’t, you’ve lost nothing but the two minutes it takes to tell me what you do.