Hey, Craig — yeah, you with the list. Either alphabetize or don’t, pal.

I know everyone points to craigslist as an example of why a site doesn’t need to have a nice design to be successful, and blah blah blah.

I say bullshit.

In the first place I have always felt that, because the service they offer is so uniquely valuable, they can get away with having a shitty site — but they are successful in spite of their shitty site, not because of it. But beyond that, their bloody sea of uniform blue links isn’t even organized properly. Aside from using text that flows from 1 column to the next — a print format that doesn’t work well on the web — their lists go from sort-of-not-quite-alphabetized to completely random to alphabetical to random again, seemingly with no rhyme or reason.

I guess the lesson is, you don’t need good design OR logical information architecture for a successful site. Yay!