{"id":11204,"date":"2019-09-11T08:30:06","date_gmt":"2019-09-11T15:30:06","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/bensettle.com\/blog\/?p=11204"},"modified":"2019-09-11T08:30:06","modified_gmt":"2019-09-11T15:30:06","slug":"the-case-for-butt-fugly-websites","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/bensettle.com\/blog\/the-case-for-butt-fugly-websites\/","title":{"rendered":"The Case For Butt Fugly Websites"},"content":{"rendered":"

“You’re so ugly,\u00a0you’re beautiful.”<\/strong><\/p>\n

— A woman at a poetry reading<\/strong>
\nspeaking to the late Charles Bukowski<\/strong><\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n

A while back on a podcast interview about copywriting, I got to talking about how ugly so very often (not always, obviously, many factors at play) beats out pretty online.<\/p>\n

Ugly layouts.<\/p>\n

Ugly fonts.<\/p>\n

Ugly links (i.e. putting the full http: \/\/… in instead of a pretty hyper link)<\/p>\n

Ugly colors.<\/p>\n

Ugly images.<\/p>\n

Ugly language.<\/p>\n

And so on, and so forth.<\/p>\n

In Yours Hideous’s experience (I have yet to see pretty beat ugly in any of my projects)\u2026 and in the experience of many people who have been doing this much longer and have seen a gazillion more tests than I have (like the \u201cfounding father\u201d of Internet marketing Ken McCarthy, the late copywriter Gene Schwartz, the late marketing genius Jim Straw, and even the Drudge Report — which looks like it was created with Netscape Composer and hasn\u2019t changed in 20+ years\u2026) ugly often works better.<\/p>\n

Why?<\/p>\n

I don\u2019t know.<\/p>\n

My *guess* is because it\u2019s like Mr. Schwartz said:<\/p>\n

\u201cIn a world of beauty the ugly thing stands out\u201d<\/strong><\/p><\/blockquote>\n

Case in point:<\/p>\n

Holly (the chick who interviewed me) was saying how her designer is always disappointed at how ugly wins, and how she once knew the owner of an art gallery who purposely hung the pictures up slightly crooked because it got people\u2019s attention.<\/p>\n

Anyway, am I saying ugly always wins?<\/p>\n

That’d be silly.<\/p>\n

But to me, it\u2019s all about standing out, especially in emails.<\/p>\n

Thus \u2014 ugly, plain text, the occasional mangled word, and the list goes on.<\/p>\n

More:<\/p>\n

If you want to write emails so ugly they stand out like a fart in study hall, run over to the link below like an 8-legged dog and subscribe to my “Email Players” newsletter.<\/p>\n

You probably won’t get any high fives from designers.<\/p>\n

But, your banker might give you one…<\/p>\n

Here\u2019s the fugly link:<\/p>\n

www.EmailPlayers.com<\/strong><\/a><\/p>\n

Ben Settle<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

“You’re so ugly,\u00a0you’re beautiful.” — A woman at a poetry reading speaking to the late Charles Bukowski A while back on a podcast interview about copywriting, I got to talking about how ugly so very often (not always, obviously, many factors at play) beats out pretty online. Ugly layouts. Ugly fonts. Ugly links (i.e. putting […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_monsterinsights_skip_tracking":false,"_monsterinsights_sitenote_active":false,"_monsterinsights_sitenote_note":"","_monsterinsights_sitenote_category":0,"footnotes":""},"categories":[8,9],"tags":[],"class_list":{"0":"post-11204","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","6":"category-copywriting-and-sales-letters","7":"category-email-marketing"},"aioseo_notices":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/bensettle.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/11204","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/bensettle.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/bensettle.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/bensettle.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/bensettle.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=11204"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/bensettle.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/11204\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/bensettle.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=11204"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/bensettle.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=11204"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/bensettle.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=11204"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}