Design
vs Content - Who is KING?
by: Romelo Itong
Well it is not Elvis, that's for sure.
I am a firm advocate of good design but most of the
time people tend to interpret design as amazing graphics
and astounding visuals they tend to forget that design
is the culmination of every aspect of good and effective
presentation into one.
We all know that design and content have equal importance
in regards to websites but if you must choose which
one is immediately important, which will you choose,
design or content? If you?re going to prepare an entire
web marketing strategy on which of these two shall
you focus on more? Why? Please defend your answer?
During my early days (around 1997), when I was still
studying/learning to develop webpages, websites with
astonishing visuals never fails to impress me and
I?d always ask myself this, ?Man, how did they do
that great graphic?? I will spend countless hours
surfing the net collecting every graphically and visually
orgasmic websites I could fine and I?ll try to imitate
and recreate them with photoshop (Photoshop 4) and
if I can?t recreate them I?ll scour the web for tutorials
on how to make those visuals. Man, if I were paying
for my internet connection I would be dead broke by
now. It was a good thing that my internet access was
free. Anyway, back to the discussion. Then it hit
me, after saving a screenshot of those awesome website,
saving all those wonderful wallpapers and all those
banners and images, in my mind a very simple question
was formed, ?When was the last time I visited these
websites again?? the answer was simple, once or never.
After, analyzing my thoughts I finally noticed that
most of these sites offers nothing but visuals. I
had spent countless hours browsing these websites
and I was only looking at their visuals, why, because
that was all they have. That was the only thing they
can offer, visuals. I finally realized that the websites
I regularly visit like Yahoo, Web Monkey, Web Developer
Virtual Library, and now google doesn?t have all these
WOW factor thing, they don?t have the bells and whistles
of those extraordinary websites. All they have and
all they offer was information, tons and tons of information.
They never bothered to develop their look and their
feel, what they developed was their content, their
information database. Millions of people or millions
of potential clients, buyers and opportunities go
to these websites not to look at their remarkable
visuals or presentations but to acquire what everybody
need information and people pay a lot of money for
information. A father will pay millions of dollars
just to get some information about his long lost child
but this same father would not pay anything more than
10,000 or even 50,000 USD just to look at a design,
he won?t even pay at all.
Content development is in a much higher level than
Design Conceptualization, Creation and Development.
Yes, design will capture your visitor?s immediate
attention. All the wows, oohhhsss and overwhelming
appreciation of the design will follow it but after
that what? I for once is very irritated of websites
which will make you wait 1 minute for you to download
their 3 minute intro just to find out later that the
information you are looking for is not there. It does
not only irritates me, it also makes me mad as hell
because I?ve wasted 5 minutes of my time for nothing
and I believe that almost all internet users especially
those on dial-up have the same sentiments as mine.
Content makes the big bucks. Here is another analogy.
It is like a commercial ad on TV, they?ll hype a product
with visuals, graphics, amazing videos, cool sounds
and they?ll even get your favorite star to endorse
it but in reality it is just as good as the next product.
If you ever seen that TV ad for a brand of powdered
laundry soap where the speaker just places the cloth
stained with grease on a basin of water and just poured
some of their product and left it, and after an hour
she?ll be back and it is already clean without any
effort from you. I tried it, using the same product
but it didn?t work. I even left it longer. It didn?t
remove the grease from my shirt but it did remove
the color and the grease is still there. I?m not saying
that the product doesn?t really work, what I?m saying
is, it is all hype just like a website with all the
hype. If you have a website that has all these bells
and whistles, have you ever wondered how many potential
paying clients have pressed the back button or have
typed in a different URL just because they can?t wait
to load your website, just stop for a while and think
of the dollars that you easily could have raked in
only if your site loaded just a nanosecond sooner.
Websurfers are an impatient breed. Very few will actually
wait until your elaborate design loads. Only those
that are interested in your design will wait and look
at it and who are they? They are not the paying public,
they are not the CEO?s, they are not the business
people and they are not the people who have the dough
to pay for your services, skills and talents. They
are not the people whom you are trying to sell your
service to. Then who are they? They are designers,
artist and creative people who are just there to steal,
copy and plagiarize your hard work.
Content is KING. In fact, it is a GOD. A website with
good and well thought out content can and will survive
longer than an extravagantly designed one. A lavishly
designed website will bring in immediate traffic but
they are not quality traffic. They could even be just
one time visitors but content, fresh and new (am iterating),
will drive not just new visitors but will bring in
more visitors which could become potential users of
your site and once they become users and get hooked
on your site then the big bucks will not be very far
behind them (hopefully).
About The Author
Romelo Jimenez Itong is a Philippine-based web designer/developer
with years of experience designing and developing
websites for US and other international clients. Visit
http://www.romelo.com for more information.
melo@romelo.com
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