Hold on a second, I’m sure it’s been at least a few hours since you’ve heard the phrase “content is king” mentioned by someone in your social media or SEO circles. Content is important for sure, but this post I’m going to talk about how and why it’s important for a completely different reason.
I’ve lost count of how many clients, friends, acquaintances and complete strangers I’ve probably talked to who are all excited about updating and revamping their website with a new design, fresh look, or sexy new theme template.
They look at their existing website and think it’s stale and boring and just not interesting for the average visitor that may see their domain and type it in or perhaps even find them in a search engine query. The immediate thought is that it must be the design. Honestly, I doubt it.
I may be (I usually am) in the minority, but a new sexy look and feel to your website doesn’t really impress me. I’m not going to your website for the same reason I’d go to an art gallery. Of course the site should be visually appealing and not just rely on its great “personality”, but for the most part I’m trying to use your site for the content I expect to be there. Who agrees with me?
What usually happens is they’ll get a new design thrown up there or plop on a new template theme and then it won’t “look” like they expected it to look. The reason is that the demo they saw of the theme or mock-up they were presented with had filler content that was specifically developed to accent and emphasizes the features of the theme.
There were chunks of text content that filled the available space nicely and flowed around other elements on the site. There were high-quality photographic images and graphics that were either purchased, custom developed or professionally taken by someone that has more than just a nice DSLR and has a self-printed business card with the word “Photographer” by their name.
If you’re looking at your website right now and think, “this needs help!”, I challenge you to stop for a minute and think about how much time you spent over the last week, month or year thinking about the actual content that was on the site. What did you contribute? Did you write anything recently? Did you ask your web team to get results with no budget for quality images and graphics?
Before you drop a budget line item for a new site design, think about your content and give that the same investment first. You may be surprised at the results you get with some great content applied to an existing and paid-for site design, instead of a new site design with the same, boring, cheap or non-existent content.
