Don't judge a book by its cover. But a website is not a book. A website if often judged by its appearance. Do you concern more about the layout or the content of your website?

People might go to a site for its content (perhaps because of high search engine ranking), even though the site could have been designed better. However, a website with a stellar design, but lackluster content really doesn't offer anything to the Internet visitor.

Basically, I think content can make up for design, but not the other way around.

First of all website (business card, forum, shop, etc.) should have some interesting content. That it`s point to exist over the Web. Then goes it`s cover. In other words. if website have a user friendly and convenient design that is really good. However even crude information have some value at all. The only thing is what are you looking for and what you want to create.

This relates to first impressions. Your website's appearance may entice a prospect to view your content, but if that content is worthless to them, good appearance or not, they'll move on. On the other hand, if you have good content, but your site design turns off prospects, you run the risk of them moving on before they even read your content. You really need both - but moreso great content.

Some of the most successful websites I admire have the ugliest and busiest layouts. However, the content and function are like no other. You can always change your layout, but if your content just sucks, then oh well.

The point is to have a easy and nice design for really useful content so books cover will exactly shows you it`s inner power

I think that you put it perfectly. content cannot make up for a site that is unreadable for bad fonts, for gawdy design that simply cannot be navigated and so on, because you just cannot get to the content in the first place!

If the site is poorly made, of course I will judge it by its looks.

use coveractionpro.com. They provide Photoshop Cover. It can be done in 5 minutes only.

I think someone missed the point

A little off track from the theme of the thread, but worth noting.

I did check out coveractionpro, and while it sounded interesting, the highest possible resolution with this software is only 300dpi.

Well, since I'm dwelling mostly in marketing I don't concern myself too much with appearance. But, by profession I'm a web designer and it's bellow my standards to have an ugly looking site. So, I tend to take care of both properly.

For me, site design is important up to a point. The design can help get my attention and make me think, "hey, I want to buy something from these guys!" at first, but at the end of the day I want to know what I'm buying.

Broken links, spelling/grammar mistakes, and difficult navigation can make me turn away from a company instantly.

I would agree that such sites would raise anyone's eyebrow. But I believe that you need very little design to sell something to a customer who is determined to find what he is looking for.

The problem really is when people go over the top. A plain and simple, functional design with good content is way better than something flashy and hard to navigate but that makes it look like the owners don't know what they are talking about because of all the grammatical errors.