Robert Scoble started a blog post about anti-marketing design site of his friend Markus Frind. He is Google’s #1 AdSense user in Canada, pulling in more han $10,000 per day from Google. His site is certainly not beautifully designed, but receiving millions of visits or tens of millions of page views every day.

Scoble thinks that the secret to his success is ugly design, or in his own term anti-marketing design. But he later explains that the site is easy to use, fast to load, uncluttered and without pretty colors or fonts.

1. I think ugly design is different than simple design.
The sample site discussed — PlentyofFish.com, a dating site — in my opinion is far from being ugly but simple. Think ugly as the first HTML page you created. A simple design page don’t integrate all the bells and whistles into the page.

2. Marketing supports simply designed site.
If simply designed site performs better than beautifully designed site, then why should the former is anti-marketing?

In fact, a good marketer know that the less links you place on a web page the better it becomes because you are driving your users to your most wanted response instead of giving them too much choices. Less choices is better. Being simple and clean is the key.

I do believe that ugly design turns people off. You want a cleanly design site to welcome your visitors into the second and next steps: reading, interacting and doing what you want them to do on your site.

With that said, marketers should really start to consider usability in their design more than anything else. A well designed blog or site boosts your brand and create an environment of professionalism. Especially for visitors who come to your site for the first time through search engines or other way, at least you want to show some credibility through design. Usability takes the rest from that point.

As always, ProBlogger has some interesting thoughts regarding the post.

Sources: Scobleizer, ProBlogger.