I just read an interesting article over at WebDesignerWall on some recent statistics on the impact design has on websites; specifically that the design of any website is carrying more weight than it used to. I won’t reitereate the whole article here, you can read it yourself, but here are some highlights.

In a poll conducted by WebCopyPlus, 25% of respondents claimed ‘poor visual presentation’ as the main thing that drives them away from websites. On it’s own, this statistic doesn’t mean much, but compare that to 2007, just two years ago when it was only 6.6%.  That was startling, even to me.

The #1 problem that turned off users was slow load times at 51%. This figure is virtually unchanged from the 2007 poll, but does underline the fact that resources are still precious, and wasting bandwidth with unoptimized images, huge photos not pre-scaled and huge flash intros is generally not good practice, with notable exceptions (like when it’s expected by the user).

Weak copy dropped from about 42% to 25% as the #1 problem. This doesn’t necessarily mean it’s not as important, rather it could be that users are finding what they need better now than they used to.