When people find out I am a web developer, one of the first things website owners will ask me is if I have some time to look at their site and see if it's any good. My follow up question to them is usually, "What do you mean?".
Most of the time when someone asks me to look at their site it's because it's not performing as well as they had hoped, for one reason or another and are trying to find a solution.
Looks comes up a lot. But the way a site looks really has nothing to do with how it performs. I have seen some rather poorly designed and unsavory sites do great things for their owners. I have also seen some really well designed sites perform very poorly.
There are some factors that determine whether a website is "good" or not. Let's go over them.