Originally Posted by harvey

And a final thought: small sites with niched content where the webmaster is a niche follower itself will usually convert well based on webmaster's knowledge of the niche and his/her own taste. And most designers won't be able to beat that unless they know the niche themselves. Now, if the designer knows the niche, it will beat the webmaster's design most of the times, probably ALL of the times (I'm talking about webmasters with no design knowledge, obviously).