[madamelic]

Yep.

Last year, I was trying lots of projects to see what worked. I made a minimalist version of YouTube but didn't want to buy a domain for a "dumb" project. I put it as a subdomain on another site then tossed it on HN. My other projects would get 2 - 5 upvotes, this got 200+ and went viral across other sites.

The site was black text on white, with a button and a textbox. People really seemed to like it.

Simple and effective websites are much better than clutter in confusion. I think lots of websites put lots of colors + graphics because they misunderstand other site's designs.

tl;dr: Users generally dgaf about your pretty colors, design and domain as long as your site works, has good grammar and doesn't look like a virus.