A beautiful website can still be a bad website, because beauty gets judged in the one state the site will rarely be in again: empty. Designs get approved on ideal-length product names, photos cropped to the exact ratio, one currency, no loading, no errors. Then the real content arrives, with 90-character titles, a supplier image in the wrong shape, a price that needs a second currency, and a form that has to say something sensible when the payment provider times out. Those states rarely get designed, so they get written by whoever happens to be in the code that day, and those are exactly the states a paying customer is most likely to hit. We now review designs against the ugliest real record we can find rather than the sample one. Probably worth finding the messiest piece of real content your site has to display before it finds you.
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