Is design overrated? « Gaming Affiliates Guide

Is design overrated?

February 3, 2010 1 Comment

Since launching this affiliate guide I have received many reactions. I have had an affiliate program reject my application because they thought my website was incomplete. I had another program ask me a few questions that clearly demonstrated they didn’t give this website any serious thought. I had another affiliate manager ask me if they can put a banner on the front page. Finally another friend who is an affiliate ask where is my logo and offered to make a logo for me as if the site was hurting without it.

I love my own website like others love their sites too but mine for other reasons. I am using wordpress with a free theme called ThreattoCreativity. It has no logo at all and trying to throw in a banner would seriously disrupt the look of the site. With this template you simply cannot put in a logo and I think many affiliates and programs spend too much time on the aesthetics and forget about conversions.

When I did the affiliate manager job for Rockbet.com the top affiliate sites produced most of their traffic from links, not banners. Likewise their websites rarely had banners and were a mix of logos, links and icons but no banners.

So how will this site work and convert? Simple, word of mouth, possibly some search engine traffic in the future, but I am selling myself more than the website.

One Comments to “Is design overrated?”

Dealer Dan says:

February 6, 2010 at 6:08 pm

To me a design should accomplish two main things:

#1: YOU should be happy with it. Because if you, the webmaster are happy with it, then you are more passionate about writing for it, or about doing work for it. I’ve had websites with “professional designs” that I’ve not been happy with, and I’ve found the work suffered.

#2: It should be easy for the user to navigate, and try and cover every web standard possible. Does GAG do that? I don’t think so. However this is your first jump into the affiliate world, and things like that you are going to learn over time. You’ll learn from your mistakes and so forth – the only way to do it is to get a website up that follows #1, because if you care about it, you’ll care about making it the best website possible for the user.