Generally, I would agree with this 100%. Unfortunately MySpace is completely shattered this thinking as all MySpace pages are unbelievably awful to look at.

Just as there’s no point having a ‘great site’, when you have no traffic, there is no point generating traffic to a poorly designed site. Business promotion strategies should be viewed side-by-side with web design techniques.

Poor site design can affect traffic generation in several key ways:

1. Poorly designed pages often perform badly on the major search engines. Chances are, if you haven’t taken the time to produce a quality site, you will have forgotten to include Meta information in your underlying code, which is used by search engines to determine rankings (as discussed in previous articles).

2. If the visitors have arrived via search engines, reciprocal links, or otherwise, and your home page is attractively built and uncluttered, you have won the first part of the battle. Now, you must keep the visitors in your site. If navigation is poor, and your other pages are hard to find, you visitors will leave as soon as they arrived… Source: bytestart.co.uk