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Ok so it's Monday and Monday's are traditionally supposed to be bad but boy does this one ever take the first place for being very bad.

Here it is, 1.15pm, and I'm just so glad I didn't have much on my 'to do' list today because I would be a screaming mess if I did. With a 5am start I've managed to get just three very short jobs done so far.

All the time in between has been taken up with family issues ... a client who deleted something not once but twice ... and a vehicle that decided today was a very good day to stop working. It took an hour for the our motoring club guy to get to the car and then it took almost three more hours for the tow truck to arrive to take it down to the repair shop.

While steam may not be coming out of my ears just yet I'm sure the safety valve is about to pop any second so I've taken the phone off the hook, turned off Skype, put my cell phone in a part of the office where there is no reception and now I'm trying to get things done. The only thing I can't do is lock the office door ... I would if I could but we share office space with another business so I can't.

On a totally different note ... there's a very interesting article over on searchengineland.com about copy v design and it asks the question that we would all love to have the answer to ... what is most important for great conversions? In other words what is more important if you want to make money from a website ... pretty designs or killer copy?

It's perhaps a lot more interesting than other attempts to discuss this topic because the article compares two sites in the same vertical that are owned by the same person.

One site is quite modern looking and has all the design elements you would expect to see in a well-designed site. There's a nice big header that's very topical ... the other graphics really do help set the tone of the site and the navigation is right where people would expect to find it.

The other site is old ... it's been around a while. There's no header ... well not that you would notice and the only enticing image was below the scroll on my monitor. The navigation consists of just three links ... one is a search button and the other two links are a bit vague when it comes to telling you what's behind them. There's a big splashy graphic part-way down the page that urges you to register for more info and there's even a statement right at the top telling you that you'll save money if you deal with this site.

That may not sound all that unusual until you realize that the value statement is the first thing people will see and that's several lines above the text that tells you what the site is about.

On a strictly visual comparison one site ... the first site I mentioned ... is quite pleasing to the eye and there's plenty of eye-candy to help confirm what the site is all about. The second site is basically ugly and there's not much eye-candy around at all.

The first site uses a font color that's quite easy to read because it has a good contrast with the background color while the second site has white text on a blue background.

So which site has the best conversion ratio? Well on the surface a good conversion ratio for these two sites is the number of people who phone the business or register for email notifications. When that is the only conversion metric the ugly site wins by quite a margin.

It consistently out-performs the pretty site. It might be ugly ... it might not be as easy to read the text ... and it might not tell you straight up what it's all about but people make the call or register for email notifications.

So on the surface you are quite right to consider that ugly sites still have the potential to convert well and that's something I've been saying for years. It's also something that has been supported by stats from plenty of other sites too.

However, there's a little catch here and it will probably leave you wondering. The pretty site may not convert as well when you're thinking in terms of the phone ringing and email addresses being added to your email list but it beats the ugly site hands down when you look at a different metric.

While lots of people make the call or register for the email notification from the ugly site not that many actually part with any cash once they have made the call or signed up for the emails. On the other hand the pretty site may not have as many conversions as the ugly site does but those conversions that it does have spend far more money than the conversions from the ugly site.

So what does that all mean? I guess it means that it's time to do some more testing.