The Scary Neighborhoods of the Internet

I'm a proud Detroiter! I was born and raised in Motor City, and, when people bring up my hometown, I tend to think of this:

While most outsiders tend to think of this:

Detroit, over the years, has earned itself a bad reputation. However, it's safe to say that every city has a "not-so-nice" area. If we think of the Internet as a place - as I often do - we know there are areas there that we don't feel so comfortable visiting...

I wonder how many free laptops we've all missed out on.

But what tells us that the street the GPS is leading us down may not be the safest? How do we know that www.facebooook.com is a virus site? Why do we think that flashy ad that shouts "Congratuations! You've won!" will kill our computer? We have no proof until we do these things, right?

It's all based on the appearance! Just as a neighborhood with abandoned, burned down houses signifies danger, so does a website with flashing ads with unlikely claims and/or a sketchy url. I recently read a Cracked article about some official websites that have poor designs, and it made me think about how web design can have an effect on the general feel of the website. For example...

I love anime! I especially love English-dubbed anime, and I found a website that offered some of my favorite shows in English. McAfee tells me all the links are okay, and (I double checked) Google agrees, but the design of the website looks a little iffy.

It still has pop-ups (an Internet sin at this point), there are some redundancies regarding navigation, and there is little consistency when it comes to which players you watch the shows on because it sometimes involves third-party websites. (I wish they'd let me fix it or at least offer some reassurance...)

Traits like this lead savvy web surfers to shy away from this potential dangerous area, but it very well may be simply poorly designed! (Granted, the aforementioned website may be foreign, so I'm unsure of the design heuristics on different parts of the globe.) Much like the websites in the Cracked article, harmlessly legit websites may drive away traffic due to their hideous, dubious-looking designs. 

This makes me reconsider clicking away from "ugly" websites. I tend to think: "Well, if x other people are using it daily, then it can't be so bad, right?" Perhaps that's not a safe assumption. Although, a moral worth taking from this post is how important design is to even the most useful websites.

After all, what's the use of a remarkable, world-saving website, when it has pop-ups?