Another title that may induce a little head scratching. I’m not a great fan of obvious titles. Maybe it’s the faint whiff of Digg bait that makes me eschew the expected and reach for a slightly cryptic opening line.

Anyway, I’ll get to the point. You wouldn’t do face to face business with someone who didn’t know how to dress themselves and was generally slovenly in their appearance. And even if you don’t agree with what I have just said I’m sure that most people would argue that being well presented is an important part of being professional.

In order to be successful your blog needs to shine. The ugly-makes-you-click rationale of Myspace doesn’t cut it with intelligent surfers. Nor will it last. Besides, to make real money online, or to be really successful and respected for what you do, you need to engage intelligent surfers.

Earlier today I was asked to carry out what could be described, if I was a lawyer, as due diligence with regard to a four figure business related purchase. Upon visiting the website of the potential supplier I was greeted by a handful of things which have caused the purchase to be put on hold.

The company could have made a sale but their website had dirty shoes. Very dirty shoes.

The website looked awful. Badly aligned text, spelling and grammatical errors and photographs that had been edited, and probably shot, by the proverbial blind woodsman.

And it didn’t end there. It proudly proclaimed that it worked best in Internet Explorer, which was obvious given its less than perfect behavior in Safari or any other browser that I was happy to use. The blog link went to a blogspot address that hadn’t been updated in months.

Amateur night. From start to finish.

An hour later and we still hadn’t found the information we were looking for. But then it appeared in the form of a Word document. A Word document of all things. Not a PDF but a damned Word document. A Word document that was set in an eye watering arrangement of Comic Sans topped off with a font that could have only come from one of a million free font sites. Add yet another smattering of spelling and grammatical errors and you probably have a good idea of what I was looking at.

You can see why the company didn’t get the order. They sad part is that they are probably a great company who just happen to be clueless when it comes to their online presence.

There is simply no need for anyone to have an unprofessional looking website. Get a host, install wordpress, pick a theme you like the look of, away you go.

If only they had done that. They would be four figures better off by now.

Clean works. Online and offline. Clean design. Clean shoes. It’s that simple.