Regardless of the content of either of those sites, the first is clearly more aesthetically pleasing despite the lack of shit moving around on the page. Scrolling to the bottom of the second (which shouldn't even be a thing at all: it's like a <100px scroll on a standard monitor and even hiding the taskbar and bookmarks toolbar in Chrome still leaves a miniscule amount of vertical scroll) reveals a copyright footer (and "top" link!) that is almost comically out of place after viewing the content above it. I would be very surprised if this site worked because of its modern web facade rather than in spite of it.
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.