This question comes up online a lot and it always strikes me as a false choice. Because you should never have to choose between a site that looks good and one that performs well.
A well-designed and well-built site should always do several things at once:
- Good SEO helps the right people find you
- Strong branding makes a clear impression when they arrive
- Good messaging helps them understand what you do and why it matters to them
- Good UX makes it easy to find what they need and take the next step
None of these things works particularly well in isolation. Traffic isn’t much use if the website doesn’t convert. World-class branding isn’t much use if nobody finds it. And neither helps much if visitors don’t understand what the next action is.
A good website should bring all those pieces together.
That’s one of the reasons I approach web projects strategy-first. Before ever worrying about colors, typefaces or page layouts, we figure out what the website needs to accomplish, who it needs to reach, what those people need from it—and how the pieces should work together.
I wrote more in-depth-ly about this in What Is Strategy-First Web Design?