Hiring a designer, or reading a bunch of design books (as stating in another comment on this link), can be a significant investment. When reading these blog pi

Hiring a designer, or reading a bunch of design books (as stating in another comment on this link), can be a significant investment. When reading these blog pieces, it never hurts to look at the perspective of the author (this is especially true for blogs like 37signals). In this case, the author had just written two articles on building a webapp that could produce a couple hundred dollars a month in revenue. He had also written about how he was having difficulty generating sales (meaning that little money was coming in). At that point, does it make more sense to throw additional money at the site to get a better design that might be a B+ design, or does it make more sense to spend a relatively low amount of money and get a B- design? You can go to D for B- for $20 bucks, or go from D to B+ for several hundred (we'll assume D to A+ is several thousand+). I think it's a perfectly acceptable choice to close most of the gap fro $20 than to spend the couple hundred. If sales improve, you can always reinvest the profits.