Plentyoffish needs to hire a designer. Assuming the number he claims is true, how many users is he loosing because of the site layout?
I might sound like a snob, but I have a hard time taking a site designed like this seriously, I don't care how many users or traffic he claims to have.
As far as dating site designs go, OkCupid looks great.
I'd say he knows his target audience well enough to make that decision himself. There is indeed such a thing as being too polished. The reason late-night TV commercials are cheesy and loud is not because the director lacks the skills but rather because it suits the target market. If POF redesigned their site to look like a glamor magazine website, he might indeed lose a lot of users because they might be intimidated by the design.
Its doesn't even need to look like a glamor magazine website (none of the dating websites do). Even if he doesn't need to make the site look half decent, the design itself is broken. Thumbnails doesn't seem to be properly scaled, they seemed compressed in to a smaller version (I could be wrong but the thumbnails are screwed up for some reason) and what is this in ever profile? http://i.imgur.com/Knicz.png
Its less than 5 minutes worth of work to fix that.
I seem to recall reading an interview where this question was asked, and the answer was basically, don't mess with what works....the idea being that, if you're constantly improving, eventually you'll screw something up. He knows it's bad, but he doesn't want to screw things up.
But I agree with you, the design is painful to look at, and usability could be improved a lot. Why he doesn't clean things up a bit is beyond me.
But then, compared to the competitors, POF may not look so pretty, but functionally it is quite good.
It's true. I built the website for my brother's company 6 years ago and it looks, well, 6 years old. Even so his company gets 80% of new clients through the website. He always asks people why they chose him. Most say because they felt it looked like a professional company compared to the "flashy" companies that have more modern websites. I hate how it looks and he's embarrassed to refer people to it, but as long as it works we don't want to touch it.
Through the years we've watched the competition go through one design after another and try all kinds of SEO, but our crappy, framed, obtrusive javascript website still outranks them. The only downside is the constant calls we get from SEO and design firms offering to "help us out".
I can offer one statistic that backs you up. A friend who had tried match.com without success asked me for dating site recommendations. I pointed her to PoF and OKCupid. She went with OKcupid over PoF saying the latter just looked cheap or 'seedy'. He could definitely improve the style sheet without going all super needlessly web 2.0. It would be interesting if he preformed some split tests with the design on new sign ups but perhaps he already has. I did read once that some e-book sellers purposely keep their sell pages looking less than beautiful as they realised it attracted more conversions. The reasoning they gave was that perhaps it gave the impression that they were just common ordinary people and therefor more likely to be trustworthy.
I might sound like a snob, but I have a hard time taking a site designed like this seriously, I don't care how many users or traffic he claims to have.
As far as dating site designs go, OkCupid looks great.