

Ask HN: Why does mediocre design succeed (companies like Weebly)? - thisisdallas

Weebly has over 12 million customers but their site templates are pretty bad. Are potential customers attracted to the service because of its ease of use or specific features? Is there a large population of people and businesses who are solely focused on having a website up and running no matter what it looks like?<p>I have nothing at all against Weebly, I am sure they are a great company doing great things, I am just curious what makes companies like that successful.
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SoHoNoVo
The "non-tech" people (ie find FTP difficult) I know personally that have used
Weebly tell me they like it because they found it's very easy to put a site
together and manage it.

Most aren't "in love" with the program, but they found it easy to get their
website put together and running, and figure that if they're looking for their
next step they'll just hire someone to build it.

The line I get from most people are along the lines of "it was just... easy...
and it worked..."

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madsushi
We call this the "PHP effect". //for the record, I love PHP

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AznHisoka
Because great design inherently doesn't solve any pains for people. Getting a
website up and running in 5 minutes does though.

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benologist
People don't give a shit how you lay your pixels out as long as they work as
advertised.

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padseeker
Web developers and designers have a tendency to be egocentric about this sort
of stuff. We say stuff to ourselves like "How can anybody use this crappy
product? You mean like IE over Chrome or Firefox?". The answer is if you don't
know any better?.....

To answer your question you need consider the following:

1\. Ease of use can be more important that exquisite design - Average person
does not value design as much as other things such as ease of use.

$0 site that is easy to build/update and done in hours/days > $$$ for
beautifully designed by some flaky web designer/developer that takes 4 months
to go live

2\. Weebly's Design isn't that bad considering how flexible and forgiving the
product has to be.

3\. Please show me an example of a comparable product to Weebly that is as
easy to use and get live but is significantly better designed?

If such a product exists then the answer might be marketing. Rob Walling of
Startups for the Rest of Us Market > Marketing > Design > Product
(functionality)

It's sad as a developer to see that Design and Functionality come after
market/marketing. It also seems to contradict a bit of my point about ease of
use for non techies being a reason for Weebly's success, but if they market
well, and it's free then they have a huge leg up.

Really considering what it is Weebly aint too shabby. It's also amazing how
many crappy sites there are out there that people continue to utilize. I did
some cold calls for my startup idea and I thought the people with crappy sites
would certainly get on board, but it didn't quite work out that way.

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harmon_michael
wix is just as easy to use and slightly better designed

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1123581321
Many of Weebly's customers would otherwise have a terrible Intuit or
YellowPages site. For them, it's a big improvement.

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true_religion
> Is there a large population of people and businesses who are solely focused
> on having a website up and running no matter what it looks like?

Yes. Any business that does more of its work offline than online, is just
putting up an online site for convenience.

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j_s
Content > Presentation

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bravoyankee
Because people actually know about Weebly, and the interface doesn't scare
them away with complexity. I think it's as simple as that.

On those terms, Weebly is quite exemplary.

