Most of what you have read about web design is wrong. The majority of mainstream designers are too obsessed with their own artistic vision or how w3c compliant their competitor’s code is to understand what parts of design really do matter.

Yes, when you are building landing pages or entire web sites — design does matter. The question is, what is helping you and what is hurting?

Make visitors eyes lock on whats important. Forget making your sites look “professional” or visually appealing. If you fail to direct the visitors attention in the correct place, you are going to kill your conversion rates — be it affiliate links or Adsense PPC ads.

How do you do this? By making appropriate use of color, contrast, and distance (see the links below for more info, more posts here are coming soon.) Every single design element on your site matters. Each element has an interaction and influence with the rest. The biggest mistake of design is placing user interest on something that doesn’t really matter. Ugliness, thats at the bottom of the list.

The less “noise” you have surrounding your point of action, the better. Your visitors have come to each page on your site for a reason. (If you don’t know why, your keyword referal data is going to give you a precise answer.) The more exact your page can deliver that reason in its entirety, the less design matters, good, bad, ugly, pretty.

So what is the reason that ugly sites work? Its because they don’t have all of that distracting artistic noise. A web site is not a painting, it is not a work of art — it is a machine. It absolutely must be functional. Yes, Lamborghinis and Ferraris are damn good looking cars, but the outward the design helps the machine functions, its not there to get in the way.

You can have a beautiful site that is designed well, if you understand the core principles of design.

So when people make fun of Myspace or Plentyoffish for looking like crap, understand that its not a random occurance — its because they delivered exactly what the visitors came for, without the noise. Google’s front page follows this same principle — Yahoo’s, absolutely not.

If you’ve been working for weeks or months on your logo and layout, forget it. Thats not what is going to make you the money. Its time to focus on what is.