As contradictory it may sound, so true they are at times. Though we have been fed by the theory of good design principles and benefits of the same, in reality however there can be seen ho poor designs turn out to be immensely successful.

However, this is not because poor website designs have an inherent property of attracting traffic and making the website successful. Rather, it is because inspite of the website design, the website does other things so efficiently that it is enough to make the site successful.

Even then the fact remains that there are some utterly poor examples of website design on the internet that continue to be successful and that too immensely successful. Some of the names of the list are YouTube, MySpace, Flicker to name a few. Poor designs don’t succeed because they are ugly, but because their strong features make up for what they lack.

Here are 3 types of successful poor designs.

Weak Design but Strong Features There are websites that sport poor designs but yet manage to enchant audiences with something that they do really well. And when the delivery of purpose is that excellent, audiences tend to overlook the design fallacies. Two such examples are YouTube and Flickr.

YouTube YouTube does not have a very pleasant design and fails to depict any brand message as such. The most irking feature on the website is the scrolling widget within the scrolling page. This hampers the usability considerably. Moreover, the listbox that accompanies the video contains a list of link to related videos. However, when the user clicks on one of the links, the subsequent page contains an all new fresh list of links. It becomes impossible for the users to watch the whole set of recommended video suggestions.

Flickr Flickr lacks the order of a corporate style guide. The alignment of things is completely haywire. While some things align to wards to the left, others align to the right and there are others who remain centrally placed. Moreover, certain pages have no clear links specified. You won’t even know they are clickable links until you hover the mouse over them. Good Websites Gone Poor

Amazon is an excellent example of websites that start well but in due course get morphed into poor designs.

The website has become an overboard of information. A typical product page on Amazon contains a product image, description, manufacturer information, purchase options, links to larger images, number of items that are in stock at present, buttons, best value offers, a list of product suggestions, customer reviews, sales rank, current rating, estimated shopping time, weight and dimensions, sponsored links, viewer ship statistics, search suggestions and more.

In addition to all this, there are also advertisements along with standard information about the company, search box and account related pages. An overdose of information creates a mess on the website and takes toll on the design features.

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