The Playground

I was wondering if maybe those of us who spend so much time on the web have a distorted view of what people in general think makes a good website. Myspace offers plenty of examples of how what we consider to be 'annoying' and basic mistakes may actually be what people are looking for.
SiteReference

Is a poorly designed site actually appealing to the non-tech crowd?

There's an interesting discussion going on over at the Site Reference forum on how poorly designed sites produce results. Google and EBay are examples of poorly designed websites, yet are is the most frequented websites on the net. A makeover has never been done and elements have been added over time without any major redesign. Andy Rutledge has a good article on this, and shows his example of a Google redesign.

An article by Molly E. Holzschlag called Thinking Outside the Grid is a brilliant read on new ways to think about web design and layout.