The debate over ugly websites verses pretty websites continues.

As a web publisher, this is what you need to know:

-Many successful “ugly” sites are actually designed a lot better than pretty sites. How so? Designers often focus on completely unimportant elements. Click the “pretty” link above, the focus of that design is the flower. As an art form that site looks great, as a functional blog its just silly.

-Have you ever used a tool that looked ugly as sin but worked great? This is like comparing an ugly battle-ready sword to a ornamental piece hanging on the wall. Which one will you pick?

All this really boils down to is usability. If your websites looks good and work perfectly, you should do just fine.

Here are some things I recommend avoiding specifically. These rules should more or less be universal, from content publishers, to social networks, to e-commerce sites.

-lightly contrasted text. ie: light grey text on a blue background. I hate to point fingers, but I always have to turn CSS stylesheets off when reading Jay’s blog.

-tiny pictures. You shouldn’t have to strain your eyes to figure out what that thumbnail is a picture of.

-highly contrasted colors in the wrong place. Use contrast to draw attention toward a certain action — ads, e-mail signups, RSS subscriptions, your logo for branding (thats what I do.) Don’t use it to draw attention to the gradients seperating every page element or a gigantic flower on the top of your page.

I think this topic calls for a free e-book. My art background goes back a whole lot further than my commercial publishing background so this shouldn’t be too hard. I make no promises yet, but I’ll be thinking about it.

For the average web publisher, free traffic is our lifeblood. Thats why SEO gets a lot more attention in this industry than PPC marketing (advertising-side), e-mail marketing, conversions, etc. Hell, I would say SEO is probably the number one thing on most of our minds.

Last week a sixth grader was suspended from school for giving Jolt gum to another student. The problem? The gum contains caffeine, a stimulant banned by the school (nevermind that they sell soda in the cafeteria.) The response from Jolt — a $1,000 scholarship. That $1,000 has bought Jolt a hell of a lot of publicity for a very small price (and made the school administration look like complete asses, but thats a different story.)

Jump over to Sweden; last week Swedish police raided the servers of a search engine called “The Pirate Bay.” This website was a search engine that allowed people to find BitTorrent files on the internet. Incidently, most of those files are for copyrighted work including movies, software, games, books, etc. Immediately following the raid the MPAA issued a press release detailing, among other things, that The Pirate Bay was raking in $60,000 a month from advertising. Fast forward to yesterday, the site is back up, under a new name The Police Bay. Along with hundreds of people in Stolkholm protesting the raid the owner issued a statement saying the site would be “bigger and better than ever.”

Think back to 1999 to early 2000 and the days of Napster. Simliar events transpired. While Napster ultimately was shut down its owner was able to spin the RIAA’s attacks and make a killing in the process.

This post isn’t about the ethics of piracy or whether kids should be allowed to injest caffeine in school. Thats not the point. The point is that good marketers can not only fend off their attackers but that they can turn them into homeruns.

Right now Shawn Hogan, the founder of Digital point, is doing taking on the MPAA. Whether he wins or not, its going to give digitalpoint some killer backlinks. I don’t think that is his intention or goal, but it will happen regardless.

Lets call this matyrdom SEO.

I suspect that every single reader here has some objective they are chasing, be it $10 a day, $310 a day, selling a business for a few million, or something more.

I think that measuring time in years hurts us. Why? Because a year is a long time. Despite being an exact measurement we use it to seperate large periods of time. Next year seems like a long ways away, when it can actually be counted in days. Right now we are 42% of the way to 2007 — that is almost half way there!

Its a cliche, but every person has the same amount of hours in every day. It is how we use them that turns those hours into money (including while we sleep.)

Check out this post over at Jensense — apparently Chitika is now running ads for girlie mags like Hustler.

Although you’d really have to make a stretch to be offended by the content of the censored icon-sized thumbnails, I could see how they might be a problem if they showed up on your Disney fan site.

As Jay Weintraub pointed out on his blog, Chitika’s past “grave publisher management mistakes” have already pounded the final nail in the coffin for these amateurs. This story is just good for a laugh, if you are still using them I you might be a little nutty (not always a bad thing in this business.)

I am reading Harvard Business Review tonight and there is an interesting article called “Understanding the Psychology of New-Product Adoption.” The author catagorizes new products into 4 catagories, Easy Sells, Sure Failures, Long Hauls, and Smash Hits.

Whats the difference between a sure failure and a smash hit? A sure failure is a product that has limited product changes but requires significant behavioral change on the part of the consumer. On the other hand, smash hits have a significant product change while requiring a limited behaviorial change by the consumer.

Think about it for a second — this ties in very closely with website development.

I have observed that my most active forum members already have experience using forums. I suspect that if you were to poll the active members of your own forums you would find similar results.

Why is this? Because someone who has never used vBulletin before has to generate completely new models in their minds just like they must do when learning to use a new software application. Just because someone registers on your forum does not mean they will be comfortable enough to become an active member — or even make that first post.

If you make your website “familiar” to visitors then they do not have to go through such a dramatic period of new behavioral change. As a user, I am happy when I visit a site and everything makes sense to me right away. If not, then my chances of leaving increase by the second.

An example of breaking down behavioral learning challenges would be making your forum look more like a social networking site. There are already many plug-ins for vBulletin that will do this for you. Of course, remember who your audience is. If you run a website on retirement home reviews perhaps big fonts and contrasting colors is a better idea.