Dear reader, let me take you back, way back. Back to a simpler time. A time of innocence and laughter. I'm sure we all have fond memories of 2007.

I had just started managing a marketing company, generating leads for property investors. Basically, we ran advertising campaigns offering to buy people's houses and then sold the resultant enquiries to property investors. It's not an especially pleasent trade but there it is.

Our website was truly disgusting. It had been designed by the managing director, using Microsoft Publisher, in under three hours. Nothing lined up with anything else, all the images were streched and distorted and the colour scheme was indescribably garish.

My first reaction was to scrap the whole site and just start over. So start over I did. I built a whole new site that, if I do say so myself, looked great.

It bombed.

I took this rather badly. How could that monstrosity my boss put together on a Saturday morning be doing better than the one I'd spent a full week working on?

Turns out that inspite of its flaws, both glaring and numerous, the old site was actually performing very well - exceptionally well by most standards. It also turns out that I knew absolutely nothing about marketing and had spent all my time making my site look pretty.

So I went back to the drawing board. Something about that grotesque website made people apply in droves, but what? I concluded that the answer must be in the layout.

To test the theory, I made an exact copy of our site and gave it a face lift. Every element of the site remained in the same place it had always been but I made it look, for want of a more elequant term, nicer. No more horrible jagged curves, no more grainy gradients and no more warped images. By the time I was finished we had a new site, structurally identical to the last, but significantly more appealing graphically.

It bombed too.

That's right folks, it bombed bad. In fact it was converting visitors to applicants at a rate of about 8% where the original design was doing over 15%!

How did this happen? Well, I can't say for sure - who really knows what's going through your customers minds - but I do have a theory.

Suppose you have a leeking tap. You go to the yellow pages and you find two plumbing companies: Alf's Plumming Services and OmniPlumb. Alf's Plumming has a small unasuming advert that Alf has clearly put together on his home computer along with a mobile phone number. OmniPlumb have taken out a half page ad, with a slick, professional layout, picture of a pretty girl wearing a headset and a freephone number.

Who do you want fixing your tap; Alf from down the road or one of OmniPlumb's faceless agents of corporate greed?

So what's the moral of the story? Should you all instruct your web designer to ugly up your website? No, of course not.

This isn't going to work for all businesses - it all depends on your market. We were typically dealing with people from low income backgrounds for whome this kind of imagery clearly appealed. If you're selling an expensive, classy product then your website would likely perform better if it reflected this image... but you don't know unless you test.

When you test your websites you've got to put your own opinions about what looks 'good' to one side. You don't count, your opinion doesn't matter. Test colours that you might not personally like, test fonts even if they don't 'suit your brand'. It's your customers who count so let them be the ones to show you how your site should look. You won't regret it.

Feel free to share your thoughts with me on this. Comments are open on this post