[someplacecold]

How a site's look affects traffic patterns and revenue is an incredibly complex and well-researched nebula. For example, Marissa Mayer talks about how a couple pixels of whitespace and subtle differences in color shades drastically affect traffic on Google.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6x0cAzQ7PVs <<= (I think that's the talk)

I don't buy that un-categorically "if your website looks BMW-fancy your visitor is going to assume BMW-pricing". Rather than opining one way or another about what look is "right" for sites, I'd be interested in the process of finding that look.