If you don’t consider yourself a talented designer, then you probably should listen to other peoples opinions even though they aren’t designers, be open to other perspective that might turn out to be better than your own initial thought.

Second of all: I’ve just found out that pleasing design from a visual perspective isn’t always the best solution. I’m working on a price comparison platform, started out making it look all pretty with lots of whitespace to get a great overview and an easy comparison between the different prices..

We tested it.. And we had more succes with our old ugly and messy design (made by a developer). They made the same amount of clicks and the same amount of sales BUT people stayed longer on the old ugly site (which I think is due to it being so messy so people needed longer time to understand the site) Longer time spend on a website = better ranking in Google.

Sites like Booking.com and Expedia.com are HUGE sites and by no doubt has the money to make a new beautiful site, but I think they are consciously making the site look “messy”, “cheap” and “ugly”, all those things gives the user a feeling of the deals being cheaper aswell and a feeling of them getting the full discount (“The company earns nothing” I’m getting it as cheap as it possibly can be)

Now I’m not saying you should make ugly messy design, but keep in mind that there goes other aspects into making a good website than the visual part alone.

(This is no attack of your article, just my viewpoint)