If CI were trying to just look good wouldn't they hire someone to make their website better?
I think you mean "If CI were competent and trying to just look good, wouldn't they hire someone to make their website better?" When you add that unspoken assumption, the answer shifts quite a bit.
It also seems that if the money is primarily coming from on high, rather than from customers, having a slicker website wouldn't make a difference- the wealthy funders don't care.
I recently found something that may be of concern to some of the readers here.
On her blog, Melody Maxim, former employee of Suspended Animation, provider of "standby services" for Cryonics Institute customers, describes several examples of gross incompetence in providing those services. Specifically, spending large amounts of money on designing and manufacturing novel perfusion equipment when cheaper, more effective devices that could be adapted to serve their purposes already existed, hiring laymen to perform difficult medical procedures who then botched them, and even finding themselves unable to get their equipment loaded onto a plane because it exceeded the weight limit.
An excerpt from one of her posts, "Why I Believe Cryonics Should Be Regulated":