Beauty Without Function Is Just Decoration
On the balance every site has to strike — and the temptation to lean too hard on either side.
There are two failure modes for a website. The first is a site that's gorgeous and unusable — clever interactions that hide the navigation, scroll-jacking that fights the reader, typography you can't actually read on a phone. The second is a site that works perfectly and feels like nothing — a template with the colours swapped, indistinguishable from the three competitors above it in the search results.
Both fail for the same reason: the people who made them only cared about half the job.
A good site holds both sides in tension. It looks like the business it represents — specific, considered, a little bit brave — and it gets out of the way the moment someone tries to do something. Beauty earns attention. Function keeps it. Lose either one and the other stops mattering.
The test is honest and unglamorous: can a tired person on a 4G phone, in a hurry, get the thing they came for in under a minute and still feel like they're somewhere nice? If yes, the balance is right.