Your standards are too high. You may be tired of Bootstrap sites, but I assure you that the rest of the world isn't and while Bootstrap's particular look/feel may go out of style, the world isn't going to get sick of sites like this just because they're Bootstrap.

When you say something is "unprofessional", you are implicitly making a comparison between it and other companies in the industry. Exec is a new service, but it serves an existing market which includes Craigslist, Angie's List, Zaarly, TaskRabbit, and AskSunday. Despite being an almost- out- of- the- box- Bootstrap design, it is already better than several of those sites!

It's perfectly fine to not like Exec's design! I'm not faulting you for thinking the type is bad (I think you're wrong about "spacing" though) or the colors generic.

What's less fine is "unprofessional". Again: I think that assertion isn't just wrong; it's part of a meme that casts a pall over the whole site, which is chock full of people who would launch services except that they're waiting months and months and months to get "good design" that nobody in the whole world cares about other than a couple loud people on HN.

I didn't mean professional in the sense of "money-earning," as you would use the term applied to participants in a certain field.

That's exactly what professional means. A professional web designer is someone who gets paid by others to design websites. Sometimes, artistic license is part of what customers want (see: professional chefs, painters, etc.). But web businesses like Exec generally want to earn money.

So any site that is optimized for profit qualifies as professional, regardless of how much you like their design.

Of course, there are caveats. Maybe some designs, while generating more conversions, would attract more short-term, price-conscious customers, instead of the upscale clientele that are ultimately more important to Exec's long-term profits. And maybe, for this service, it's important to be seen as "stylish" to generate good word of mouth. But, ultimately, whatever design is best for Exec is the most "professional."

To maybe put it more easily, and to bridge the gap between the two usages: the facelift looks like it was made by a professional designer and is thus a professional design. The existing site looks amateur because it appears as if the person who designed it would be unable to charge for their design services.

To argue the opposite would require some kind of weird personification of the design, as in, "this design is a wage-earning participant in its field," which just doesn't comport with how people use "professional" when they apply it to products and especially to designs.