Finally back to lurking the sowpub board again, after a few years (dunno if anyone other than Thomas, and possibly Dien Rice, would remember me). I've been looking for posts on CPC methods, and affiliate systems.

I clicked through to two links from these boards:

http://www.businesslyceum.com/DepressionProof.html
and
http://www.midasreports.com/stoprefundscold/

and it got me thinking ... is it detrimental for these pages to be so "bland". The information is without doubt useful, but I have to seriously work to absorb the information. On a wide screen monitor like mine, each line stretches out a long way. There are a lot of design conventions that these pages seem to completely ignore, conventions aimed to improve readability of text, etc. Also, I've been looking at some pages written by Shawn Casey, his first introduction was a sideshow presentation with audio, which definitely helped me to assimilate his information with a lot less pain than reading blocks and blocks of text.

Is it then an advantage, or a disadvantage to have "bland" layouts? On one hand, it's less attractive, and more difficult to get customers, on the other the people that knuckle down and read through the text are definitely looking for the information and haven't just clicked away.