If web design is so important, why are some leading ones – particularly MySpace and eBay – are so grotesque and hard to use?

Marketing gurus never need any encouragement to stress the importance of tip-top web design. Well-forged combinations of content, functionality and usability should theoretically have visitors falling over themselves to click on tactile, airbrushed widgets in the pursuit of an aspirational Web 2.0 experience. But for some people – including reader Gordon Whitehead – such feature-rich content represents unnecessary overload: “Few websites seem to recognise that our ability to take in information on a screen is much less than on a printed page,” he says. While some sites, including Google, have recognised this and stripped back the interface to its bare bones, two of the biggest – MySpace and eBay – have dominated the web despite having ugly and unintuitive layouts. So, do we really care?

Many of you seem to. “The hideousness of MySpace is hilarious,” writes Joanne Warren, “especially when you compare it to Facebook.” Graham Seldon agrees. “The only thing that keeps me going back to MySpace is the fact that my friends do. It’s like a pub that you stay loyal to, despite the beer being vile and the landlord being rude.” The need to keep logging into both MySpace and eBay is an irritant for many: “I understand the security issues,” emails in Steve McEvoy, “but I seem to have to type my password into these sites far more than any others.” And the complex world of eBay’s selling options can be equally off-putting. “I’m sure I’d use it more if it didn’t take me 30 minutes to list one item for sale,” continues Steve.

The fact is, we quickly get used to substandard design and learn to put up with its inadequacies. But some benevolent souls have put effort into solutions which don’t blight our senses quite as much. Mike Davidson, the CEO of the gorgeously designed newsvine.com, set himself the task of using Myspace’s customizing facility – much abused by its largely teenage userbase – to try and come up with an attractive profile page; you can have a look at the results and borrow his techniques at myspace.com/mikeindustries. Meanwhile, the chore of listing items for auction on eBay is made less arduous by eBay’s Turbolister software; it’s Windows-only, but has improved greatly over earlier versions. For general eBay browsing, the new eBay Companion for Firefox (www.mozilla.com/add-ons/ebay) is not only a breeze to use, but another good reason to switch to using the Firefox browser. In fact, a Firefox plug-in called Stylish even allows you to customize the look of every individual website you visit – should you have considerable patience, and a lot of time on your hands.