Danlew.com

I was amazed to see there are a quite a few sites out there which are very high Alexa ranked that do not have a design or skin. Take Craigslist as an example, it is the 27th most visited site in the world and doesn’t even have a god damn logo! Their site doesn’t come any basic then this and yet there are developers all around the world trying to clone it.

Craigslist, Digital Point, Wikipedia & Google to name a few….

Digital Point Forums is also another good example being listed as 257 th most visited site in the world according to alexa. It’s site pulls in around $10,000 a month from google adsense and has around 300,000 members. You would think with the amount of money that is generated from a site like this could atleast skin the site other then using a default template.

Another one is Wikipedia, perhaps they are an exception due to the design of the logo, but the rest of the site is purely default looking.

But my favourite example would have to be Google the whole search engine is as basic as it gets except for their logo of course and sometimes this is all is takes, but for the lucky few, I will continue to be a believer in design.

The key to success with any website is less distraction as possible and with little advertising where possible.

You can see that from the 4 sites I mentioned, their ads are very neat and out of the way. This is key for successful sites. Another great example of this is Twitter and Youtube. No advertising clutter!