Focusing on CONTENT over design

In the world e-Business and online marketing today, entrepreneurs must focus on developing KILLER CONTENT over creating a flashy design. As the SEO/SEM landscape continues to unfold, it is quickly becoming a mandatory topic for research and understanding. Especially on a medium as large and vast as the Internet, it is content much more than design that will be the fuel that drives your online business.

Do not mistake me, it is important to have a website that has a clean and professional look and feel to it. However, in comparison to content, the look of a site has little to do with its success. A perfect example of this is Craigslist. On a scale of 1 to 10, I would give Craigslist a 3, and only that high because I would award some merit for simplicity. But it wasn’t its sexy look that boosted Craigslist to the height of our awareness, but its usability and content.

Seth Godin talks about this lack of importance on design in one of his blogs entitled How to create a good enough website. He says:

“For most people, that's all you need. A website that's good enough. Not that breaks new ground, establishes a new identity, discovers new ways for people to interact online. Just a good enough website that didn't kill you to launch…I'm going to go out on a limb and beg you not to create an original design.”

What Seth understands by saying this, is that the success of a website/e-business doesn’t hinge on a beautiful design. It is the content that fuel that appeals to your target market, drawing web visitors to your site, which turn into leads, opportunities and finally customers. Sure a great design doesn’t hurt, but realize that it is not critical to your success.

A point that is driven home in a awesome webinar by Hubspot.com called ‘Doing a Website Redesign with an Internet Marketing Strategy in Mind.’ In it, Mike Volpe, VP of Marketing, discusses how and when to redesign a website. Emphasizing that the goal of the redesign has to be to increase traffic and leads, not make it better looking.

If you are going to spend valuable resources (time and money), on web development, be wise and spend more on content than design.