There are many websites which is not as per customer liking. This website is having high degree of time and money investment. Customer feedback can greatly impact the thought process of designer. There may be many stack holders and they may have differing opinions. So instead of asking them, directly ask your users. The good way is that the prior you do that in the earlier interface design phase, the more effective findings you can get and implement the from testing.
Most of the time in websites designing many stake holders is involved in and in design process they all want to see their opinion implemented to the website. This is not good as there are chances about too many cooks spoil the broth. A websites should serve business purposes however the crucial thing is who takes decision about balancing designing. It is not always true that all good designed and good looking website do good. It happens many times that good looking and sharp looking graphics website does not match customer requirements. All in all it depends on what the real-time usage going to be and how user will use the website. In the initial launch users may get perplexed by looking new design ideas and much unnecessary eye catching stuff on it.
A website which does not serve its purpose may cramp entire website and it's Return on investment. It will result in lowering down revenue. It will lead you to make changes sooner or later. This will affect you a lot because website's ROI drops through lower conversion rates. Implementing new changes on already developed website will demand for more time and investment. This will require more time in comparing to the same changes had been implemented in the stage beginning stage of website design.
Studies have shown that user testing done in early stages tends to get almost 90% of usability related issues in website design. The good thing is that it only requires less user tests for best result. It is not good idea to test the system with the colleague sitting next to you. It is better to arrange real users from your targeted user groups. This will give you open feedback from them. You can monitor them surfing through your website design. After getting feedback from real-time users make sure that you implement suggestions and defects in right manner so it will be useful for end-users.