Yes, you should care how your website looks. Appearance matters, though there are a good number of successful websites on the Internet that can make a convincing argument to the contrary. We live in an image-oriented society where what is on the outside initially counts more than what is on the inside.

Indeed you should always strive to put your best face forward; but should you spend more time concerning yourself with how your website looks than with what your website does, how it does what it does and how your audience values your product?

More often than not I have found that the average surfer is out looking for something specific and has no interest whatsoever in the design aspect of a website. They only care to know if you have what they are looking for, and they are not about to spend an eternity searching through your myriad cupboards to see what goodies you might be storing, regardless if your site is of award-winning quality in design or just a navy background with loud, yellow text. If they don’t immediately find what they are looking for they are off to the next merchant.

People are busy, just like you. They have places to go. They have things to do. They use the Internet for one particular purpose or another, and they do not make it a pastime to checkout websites to see which websites look better than which. It is only a competitor who might care what your website looks like, who might try to have a better looking website than yours. And while the two of you are busy trying to outdo each other, the merchant from an obscure town in Idaho who got a High School student to put up a plain, simple website with text, “2 lbs Idaho Russet Potatoes $1.99. Shipped Same Day. $2.95 Delivery — anywhere in the US. Click here to order” is raking in the $10,000 per day you’re costing yourself by spending your time obsessing over whether one shade of gray might be better than another to use as a cell background color.

Your customer cares about whether or not your product or service meets his/her needs. And they want to know this right away. They want it in their faces. They don’t want to to search through 25 pages of lead-ins before they get to the point. They won’t stick around that long to find out if you have what they need.