I agree 100%. Clean black and white would look way more professional. From there, add a color here and there but the theme used here is damn ugly from my point of view.

They eye of the beholder...

Do you aim to change the definition of "ugly"? The site is good-looking and totally professional with some good features. Read rest of the comments to know more :)

I can't tell if this is sarcasm. The site looks like it was designed by a versatile programmer who knows what attributes a good-looking site should have, but can't reproduce it himself.

Looks more like a site put together by a programmer who downloaded a premade HTML template.

No sarcasm here. I really want to know that as a user what is driving you off that site?

JPEG artifacts on the logo, The arrow images left to "Cloud", "Open", "Social" and "Secure" are not antialiased. The arrow in the search box is below the center of the box, and lots of other minor issues that makes it look really awful.

Kudos for having an eye for detail, and I agree on the anti-aliasing part. Much appreciated. But aesthetic details are just a subset of professionalism, its not professionalism all by itself. The site has different section for intro, pricing, faq, blog and moreover they have a well done short video explaining what Database.com is about. These details are professional enough for a user to stick.

Are they? Like the OP of this thread, my immediate impression was that I was at the wrong site. It just feels like a domain squatting site, really (especially the "database.com" in the upper left. Here in the 20xxs it just isn't that impressive that you got a dictionary word domain, so stop being so impressed with it).

Seriously? Which domain squatting site has so much of information and a video which explains it's service! Just because it's 2010, does not mean that no one can have a dictionary word domain. They probably had lot of money to spend so they got it.

I am not hugely impressed by the artwork of the site but it is definitely not the worst site that I have seen

Many spammers know how to embed a YouTube video (it uses the YouTube player...), and I'm not going to click through to the other information if I think I'm on a cybersquatter page. They presumably spent at least a mid six figure sum* on the domain back in July, which makes the amateurish landing page even more embarrasing.

It's not the worst site I've seen, but I've seen better landing pages designed as weekend projects by people who then post on here with all the appropriate "I'm not a designer...can you give me some help please" questions and get advised to commission a freelancer who knows a bit about colour schemes as well as having the time and skill to add polish. For a major launch from a massive corporation whose products are (theoretically) driven by good UI and a consistent corporate image http://www.salesforce.com/assets/pdf/misc/SFDC_StyleGuide120... it's quite shameful.

*reserve price if you wanted to buy at auction earlier in the year was $800,000

I agree, it looks like total 'programmer art'.

The flat grey at the top. The logo. The badly resized bullet points with jagged artefacts. No sign of the original salesforce logo. All the fonts are a little too big, but not in a pretty way. The pricing page.

I guess there's something to be said for simplicity, but this site looks like a Frontpage template.

It resembles some of the standard Joomla/Drupal templates.

My first thought was "probably designed using PowerPoint"!