Onsharp is in the business of designing and building beautiful websites, as well as providing web applications and development. We're proud of the appearance of the sites we build, as well as of their overall quality and optimization.

But you have to wonder: how much does that matter?

Search engines can't see the beauty of a website, and they don't have much aesthetic sense anyway, what with being machinery and all. They don't choose sites because they're beautiful, or reject them because they're ugly.

So perhaps an ugly website would do just as well as a beautiful one. 

We don't think so.

Here's why:

• Part of the beauty of a website may be its colors and images, which the search engines cannot in fact see. But part of the beauty is the website's bones -- its information architecture, which search engines can see. Given equal quality of content, Google will choose a cleaner, standards-compliant, fast site over a poorly-built one. Well-built sites look better to humans, too, as it happens.
  
• Part of what makes search engines choose one site over another is the number of links the site has from other sites. Links are generally placed by humans. People are more likely to link to your beautiful site than to an ugly, poorly-designed one.
  
• People are also more likely to click through to your beautiful site from Twitter, Facebook, and other places that show a screenshot. That traffic can be great for your business, regardless of what the search engines do.
• A beautiful site will be more appealing to your visitors, and they will be more likely to become customers. A professionally-designed, attractive site makes your company look better to people who visit your website. You look professional and trustworthy, so visitors are more likely to shop at your website or to visit your place of business.