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A good website design vs high quality content - Which one is more important?



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A good website design vs high quality content - Which one is more important?

Everyone knows that both design and content are essential for any website. But which one if more important? On what should you concentrate the most? Having an awesome and impressive design or making sure your content is 10x better than the competition? 
A good website design vs high quality content - Which one is more important?
I'm sure most of you, especially the content writers here are inclined to believe that content is more important than design. Truth is that a mediocre design can still sell if the design is good enough, but a badly designed web page will never make it, not even with high-quality content! 

And when I'm talking about design, I'm not referring strictly to the way it looks:

  • I'm also referring to users experience if you make the mistake to place the order button on the wrong side of a page you are essentially screwed. 
  • Colors are also hugely important, people react and expect certain colors on certain niches. 
  • The font and the actual way you deliver the content matters a lot. Huge paragraphs on small fonts can make any good content completely useless. 
People will choose if they want to order from your website strictly on based on how they interact and feel about your website's design. The actual content doesn't matter if your website doesn't "look" trustworthy. 
Some common design elements that may make people to distrust your website: 
  • Borning plain design without any elements to catch the eye. 
  • Complex website structures that will make the user dizzy. 
  • Small text fonts, this may incline that the website owners have something to hide.
  • Lots of ads and pop-ups that annoys the user. 
So let's recapitulate, this is why web design is more important than web content:1. People are visual beings. They first see and analyze what is in front of them, they'll read the details later. 
2. Users need to know where they are and where they are heading. This is why a perfect and clearly design website structure is essential!
3. Use the right colors! Having the right text and content for the click to action is important, but choosing the right colors in the call to action button is even more important! Having the right colors in your design could mean the difference between a good conversion percentage and a failed project.
4.  It needs to look professional and made by professionals. Trust is everything when it comes to online stores and even blogs or another form of websites that deliver only content 

So here are my main reasons why I think content is less important than design when it comes to any website on any niche out there. I would love content to actually be "king" and rule over any other aspect of web marketing, but unfortunately, we also need to exercise our creative part and ensure with have the perfect design with a proper user experience. 

What do you think? Content or Design? Which is more important for you? 

Comments

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victoriagomezv
I 100% agree.

Design is your first impression on a website, what you do after clicking one is skimming through the page and soaking it all in, rarely do we ever expand an article before it (unless it has a good header image which again, falls into the design category)

I pride myself in being able to tell how trustworthy a site is by how it looks so now that you mention it, I could be easily tricked by a good-looking scam page so that's definitely something to keep in mind.



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Makefort
Agreed as well. A good mix of both is the best thing to do, but since we as humans always take first impressions as granted, in most case scenarios design would win over content. You just can not deny the fact that a certain site has kept you away just because of the design. A good example from my side would be reddit. I was avoiding it for a long time just because of their design and the way the site works, but I was wrong to do so, since it is a really nice community.



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clara1993
I would chood A website with good Contents aver a website with a good design:-)
I know a good design attract attention but When you find nothing interesting then, You'll just click on next boutton and say uuuh! What a waste of time! It's like a book with a good cover but when u open it you find it most boring book ever :-)°



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vinaya
Both are important, but I think quality content is more important. Search engines are primary traffic source. When visitors land on your page through search engine they are there for content. If the content has no quality, they will leave soon, design will not hold them too long.



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Corzhens
I will also go for quality content because that is the primary building block of the website. As they say, there is no website if there is no content. We all know that quality content gives the site a good ranking with the search engine search results and the website design does not matter much in that department. But as you said, the website design and quality content are both important so we might as well look into that direction all the time.



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kaka135
I agree with you. Unless I know the website owner well enough to let me stay on the website and read more about the posts, otherwise I might just turn off the website if the design is not good and user experience is not friendly. I don't even wait and read the content. I believe there are many good websites out there with user friendly design and good content too, so I don't want to "suffer" myself staying on a website where I feel uncomfortable reading. Moreover, if the reading experience is not pleasant, it's not likely I will get much out of the content too.



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Makefort
This is where not only the design comes in mind in its purest form. What you have stated is a really good point. If you have a solid design and friendly UI, you can still fail if you use wrong combination of colors and make reading experience bad. Nice point kaka!



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RosieCheeks
Both are equally important because both create the impression about the website. If the design is poor, it will push away the audience and nobody will care about the superior quality of content You put. If the design is awesome, You will get visitor`s attention, but for few minutes only. So, my opinion, You cannot ignore any of them, while working on Your website.Both are crucial!



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hermessantos
Ambos são importantes, no entanto, acho que um conteúdo de qualidade é mais relevante.

Por outro lado, penso que, se um site tiver um bom conteúdo e um layout ruim, as pessoas irão visitá-lo automaticamente e sua taxa de rejeição será muito grande e isso pode afetar diretamente o posicionamento do Google no site.

Então eu acho que o conteúdo é 55% importante e 45% de layout.



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centurion
Hello
Have a wonderful day.

Design is not a major factor for Search Engine Optimization. Content is very much important. Content should need to become unique and SEO keyword based and content should need to stay on online by following the SEO keyword density rules. Important keyword based content generate 85% traffic to your website from different sources. So for the huge traffic content should need to be stay unique, copy scape free, plagiarism free and 100% unique also.

Thanks
Centurion



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Kidthebilly
I think it's a matter of perspective and what you want to do or look for in the moment. If you are browsing the web by viewing random pages, surely the design will draw more attention to the beginning than the content that the website can offer. But suppose you are looking for an urgent information on a specific topic, at that time your interaction with the web page, will take a back seat because you will be more interested in finding good information content.



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Fuzyon
I don't think you can choose between the two since they both can make or break a website. The design is extremely important for people who are new to your website and want to gauge what your site is all about but great content will make them stay for a little while instead of leaving after clicking the first article. There needs to be a balance.



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JoeMilford
This is a great question--obviously, without a design which is accessible, pleasing to the eye, and interesting, an audience will be less likely to be drawn into the content. However, no matter how awesome the design is, if the content is subordinate or lacking, the audience will not return. You can build better web designs and even hire people to do that, but good content, that is what people are hungry for, and that is much harder, and much more important, to manufacture.



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limberg
If I have to pick only one, I'd have to go with quality content. Quality content is hard to come by nowadays. If you have good content, there's a huge chance that Google and other search engines would rank you higher. Quality content would be great for SEO. Now imagine a website that has great design but awful content. Would that website do well in the search engines? Probably not.

You create a website because you intend to provide content to your visitors, not to just simply show off a good website design. In my opinion, quality content always comes first. Great design and layout could easily follow.



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Corzhens
It should be the best combination – high quality content and good website design. But given a choice between the 2, I will still go for the high quality content because content is king all the time. Assuming that the bad design is not really that bad, the content can hold the visitor’s interest with the relevance and substance of the content and probably the visitor can ignore the bad design. But no matter how good the design is but the content is bad then that is goodbye to the visitors.



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Kakashi2020
I would have to choose good content over a good website design because a website without good content is utterly useless. While a badly designed website with great content can still be visited and it's content used and appreciated.



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