Compared to what I'm talking about, your site is very attractive. I'm talking about stuff where you built the back-end but the customer hired a terrible designe

Compared to what I'm talking about, your site is very attractive. I'm talking about stuff where you built the back-end but the customer hired a terrible designer, or stuff where you were brought in to do maintenance on an existing site that just looks absolutely terrible. Most clients won't care that you wrote great code and cleaned up the existing issues; they'll just see the crappy design.