(Rational) website design and cognitive aesthetics generally- why no uptake?

So I’m working for a friend’s company at the moment (friend is a small business owner who designs websites and a bit of an entrepreneur) anyway, I’ve persuaded him that we should research the empirical literature on what makes websites effective (which we’ve done a lot of now) and to advertise ourselves as being special by reason of doing this (which we’re only just starting to do).

One thing that I found absolutely remarkable is how unfilled this space tends to be. Like a lot of things in the broad area of empirical aesthetics it seems like there are a lot of potentially useful results (c.f.http://​​www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/​​pmc/​​articles/​​PMC3485842/​​ ), but they’re simply not being applied- either as points of real practice or of marketing differentiation.

A fascinating gap.