Sometimes there is a misconception that if your site doesn’t look good, it won’t be successful. That is false. Great design only goes as far as great content. In other words, if the content of your site is crap, a great design can’t do much for it.

We always come across people, sometimes potential clients, that want to dive right into a project saying “I want it to look this way and that way.” It’s rare that we get a client that wants to just dive right in and map out a strategy for the content. Well, that should be what happens first. As designers, we need to know what we’re designing for, otherwise, we’re just making a page look pretty and not solving business problems. It can end up being a waste of our time, and your money.

If you’re thinking about a site (re)design, think about your content first. Think about what you want to say to your customers/users before you think about how you want it to look. Not sure how to do that? Shauna Nicholson has some good tips on the subject. Once you have great content, then follows great design, and a successful website. It takes some work, but content should never be an afterthought.