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I totally do not concede the point that IAMEXEC.COM looks conspicuously weak and unprofessional. Exec's site looks better than Angie's List, for instance, which looks like a 2008 Themeforest template but still manages to engage normal people just fine.

The bar for web design excellence on HN is way out of whack for what the bar actually is in the real world.

This matters because I think lots of people talk themselves out of launching out of concern that some web design enthusiast is going to come out of the woodwork and accuse them of being "conspicuously unprofessional". Trust me: people have driven a shitload of business through sites that I'm sure would make you throw up in your mouth.

The fact that there exist weak and unprofessional sites representing successful companies is not a counterargument against my evaluation of Exec's design. I never claimed that Exec was doomed to fail, or even that they imperatively need a redesign. I didn't make any kind of point about how much impact visual design has on a business's success.

My point was about the relationship between two designs: the original Exec design and the "facelift." The facelift is much more professional, and looks much less thrown-together. To add some context, too, I'm not "coming out of the woodwork" to criticize the company. I was responding to what seemed like a lot of misplaced negativity about the facelift.

I think it's definitely possible for a company to do very well without a well-designed website. But that's not really what we're talking about, is it?

If you had said their design was "weak", I wouldn't have a strong argument. You said their design was "unprofessional". Strong disagree, and disagreement worth having: people here are too hung up on unreasonable standards of "professionalism". "Professional" is a best practices standard. It very much depends on context. Angie's List is a giant site in Exec's space. Exec's launch website is to my eyes totally professional, cleaner and better written than Angie's List.

What, exactly, do you think is more professional about the redesign?

"Professional" in the context of visual design is about the aesthetics of business (as opposed to the aesthetics of, say, amateurs). I didn't mean professional in the sense of "money-earning," as you would use the term applied to participants in a certain field.

Exec's launch website is unprofessional because it is unpolished, visually unresolved, and appears to have taken little time to create. I don't want to break down into a detailed argument over specifics, but the biggest problems have to do with spacing, type size, the crappy icons, and the hyper-generic elements like the buttons, background tiles and color palette. Also, the logo (which isn't very distinctive in and of itself) isn't even used throughout.

The redesign is very carefully proportioned and arranged. It uses somewhat less generic colors and buttons and so forth, and some simple visual ideas are repeated throughout to create a sense of continuity and harmony. Each section flows well from on area to the next.

Again, I think you might be projecting a little bit. Who's "hung up" on "unreasonable standards" of professionalism? The post is about a person redesigning Exec's landing page. The redesign is more professional, looks more polished and refined and careful, than the original. I don't think that's a huge deal, and I don't think that makes Exec a huge failure or something. I'm not insisting that they raise their design to any standard.

EDIT: FYI, I'm not really much of a web designer myself. Kyro can probably define the problems with the existing site in much more detail than I could.

This debate is very interesting, and you've both made some great points. But I lost you entirely with this post:

I didn't mean professional in the sense of "money-earning," as you would use the term applied to participants in a certain field.

That's exactly what professional means. A professional web designer is someone who gets paid by others to design websites. Sometimes, artistic license is part of what customers want (see: professional chefs, painters, etc.). But web businesses like Exec generally want to earn money.

So any site that is optimized for profit qualifies as professional, regardless of how much you like their design.

Of course, there are caveats. Maybe some designs, while generating more conversions, would attract more short-term, price-conscious customers, instead of the upscale clientele that are ultimately more important to Exec's long-term profits. And maybe, for this service, it's important to be seen as "stylish" to generate good word of mouth. But, ultimately, whatever design is best for Exec is the most "professional."

@asr: we're getting kind of into the weeds, but you're talking about the difference between a professional design and a professional designer.

To maybe put it more easily, and to bridge the gap between the two usages: the facelift looks like it was made by a professional designer and is thus a professional design. The existing site looks amateur because it appears as if the person who designed it would be unable to charge for their design services.

To argue the opposite would require some kind of weird personification of the design, as in, "this design is a wage-earning participant in its field," which just doesn't comport with how people use "professional" when they apply it to products and especially to designs.

This right here is the mentality that bothers me.

I promise you: the industry of professional designers is full of people who believe that only professional designers can create sites that will pass muster with buyers in the real world.

The reality is simpler, cheaper, and fairer: there is indeed a minimum standard that company websites need to achieve to look like a "real company", but it is many many thousands of dollars cheaper than a professional design project. You can buy it for tens of dollars on Themeforest. Your customers, unless you sell primarily to designers†, will never notice or care.

Most professional design projects by pre-revenue companies are vanity exercises. A lot of professional design projects post-revenue are too.

It is completely f'd up to say that a company looks unprofessional because its website isn't the product of a professional design project. Professional designers are not the gatekeepers of professional startup site launches. They just aren't. People need to stop acting like they are, because it's keeping them from getting to market.

† Do not do this.

@tptacek You aren't listening, you're getting all hot and bothered about a claim you keep hearing that I'm not making. I don't think that professional design is important for startups.

It's a bit much to obsess about semantics and then throw your hands up in despair that people make the kinds of distinctions that counter your points.

Who, exactly, is saying to you that "only professional designers can create sites that will pass muster with buyers in the real world"?

I'm just pushing back on the word "unprofessional". I care less than it looks like I do. :)

IAMEXEC.COM is done on the (very carefully designed) Twitter Bootstrap grid. The spacing and type size are mostly inherited. The color scheme is black & white with accent blue. The photography on the site is custom and reasonably well done.

Your standards are too high. You may be tired of Bootstrap sites, but I assure you that the rest of the world isn't and while Bootstrap's particular look/feel may go out of style, the world isn't going to get sick of sites like this just because they're Bootstrap.

When you say something is "unprofessional", you are implicitly making a comparison between it and other companies in the industry. Exec is a new service, but it serves an existing market which includes Craigslist, Angie's List, Zaarly, TaskRabbit, and AskSunday. Despite being an almost- out- of- the- box- Bootstrap design, it is already better than several of those sites!

It's perfectly fine to not like Exec's design! I'm not faulting you for thinking the type is bad (I think you're wrong about "spacing" though) or the colors generic.

What's less fine is "unprofessional". Again: I think that assertion isn't just wrong; it's part of a meme that casts a pall over the whole site, which is chock full of people who would launch services except that they're waiting months and months and months to get "good design" that nobody in the whole world cares about other than a couple loud people on HN.

Because I'm not an active web designer, I'm not even really familiar with what Bootstrap sites look like. You're making all of these assumptions about my background and motives. The site looks generic (based on experience gleaned from looking at lots of sites, rather than participating in some kind of elite designer cabal), the spacing is cramped, and the type looks bad. Putting something on a grid alone doesn't make it look good.

Since you bring it up, the top photo is fine but especially the photo of the desk looks quite poor. But hey! Still not suggesting that matters to the business's bottom line!

I haven't told anyone not to launch, I haven't said it's important for startups to look professional, and it's still true that Exec's design is a bit crappy and unprofessional.

It just looks like YET ANOTHER TWITTER BOOTSTRAP SITE. It might be the fact that I've had a headache for most of today, but it feels like every fucking link I click on nowadays is an un-tweaked Twitter Bootstrap site. It is so annoying.

Without a brief and without data, the designer here is clearly only improving the visual aspect of the website of it (the redesign 1 page and is in image format is a big clue). Which is something alot of the other commenters just don't get it.

It's visually appealing, professional and a vast improvement over the current site. Critiquing anything else beyond that is moot.

When someone start expecting a designer to do copy writing, AB testing, marketing, then they will also expect them to code in HTML, CSS, JS, and before you know it, they're the classical example of those looking for unicorn designers.

Even some of the design critiques here are perfect candidates for clientsfromhell.com ie: "Make the gold golder."

"Critiquing anything else beyond that is moot."

The goal of good design is to communicate the values and value proposition of the site. Any website should look professional and visually appealing, but the fact that a website is professional or visually appealing tells you nothing about whether or not the site is actually well designed.

Can you critique anything beyond the visual aspect based on that single static image? You can't because there's no data, no testing done, no brief - no context.

Meaningful feedback and constructive critique could be provided if the site was live, if we can see some hard numbers or we can do some user case studies as they use the site.

From a strictly visual standpoint, I can agree with your assessment. But a good /design/ needs to consider the copywriting and marketing standpoint and the larger picture as a whole. Design in itself is not restricted to the visual. Design as a whole is uniquely goal related. Almost all the time, it involves more than the work of just a visual designer.

With respect to OP, I think it's fairly clear he took the role of a visual designer in his work and should be criticized more on that aspect. But in the larger picture, I think a good designer (of any capacity) should be able to at least consider the marketing and copywriting goals. While these roles should not be merged into one - there's a role for someone who can consider all these to coordinate these unique needs. I personally feel that a designer who has an understanding of business needs is better suited for this goal than the alternative (that's not to say its a necessity for all designers)

Design is something almost everyone feels qualified to criticize, so a post like this lends itself to all kinds of bikeshedding.

Fortunately, we live in the age of A/B testing. Rather than listening to any of the speculation in this thread, the thoughtful businessperson can actually quantify just how good or bad a design is at achieving its goal.

By your logic, isn't this post itself an instance of bikeshedding?