How much does a website's design matter to you?

[Cedric]

If you browse on a forum or website, and you think the website's/forum's design is poor, or default for that matter, do you still browse on it? Does content make the site's visual design completely irrelevant? Or do you judge a website/forum on it's appearance and leave it if doesn't suit you?

 

[Shortie]

When it comes to the design of a forum or website, I don't mind seeing default themes if that is the easiest and cheapest way for a forum or website to start out or if it's something they prefer. The only time I would turn away from a forum or website is if the place in question really didn't seem to care about the appearance of their website and if it looked messy and not well put together.

 

[synpastel]

Overall I prefer a minimalism aesthetic. I don't want pictures everywhere. I don't want "scroll to read more" everywhere. I don't want "hover for more info" (THIS IS TERRIBLE on mobile devices, which most users use now to view boards). People who make their boards often have zero prior experience creating skins or modifying them and it's painfully obvious.

People's attention spans are notoriously short online. Don't be making 'newbie mistakes' with this (like bright yellow font on white skin or tiny-tiny font on your site. The internet doesn't run out of space, y'all). I hate all caps typing too because it's painful on the eyes.

Also, also, the "3-d image effect" (red and blue lines close each other) CAUSE HEALTH PROBLEMS. I hated when that trend was going. It literally hurt my eyes and head when it was going everywhere.

If I don't have to zoom in to see your text, I'm good. If the colors look decent enough together (I'm not asking you to be an expert on color theory), it's fine. If I don't have to zoom in/out on every page because your mobile version of your skin doesn't suck, you're fine.

 

[Cory]

A default theme doesn't matter to me if it's a clean design. If the design is overall terrible, like below a 5 on a scale of 5/10, I'd probably pack up and leave the forum since they didn't take the time to find/build an aesthetic design and just kind of threw something basic together.

 

[Arantor]

I mostly care that if I'm going to be spending any real amount of time there, that it looks reasonable. I have in the past gone out of my way using plugins like GreaseMonkey/TamperMonkey/Stylish to reskin sites to make them easier to use without imposing on the webmaster and in one case even went to the point of writing a custom browser plugin to make the site easier to use.

I try to solve my own problems