Your company just signed a contract with an inbound marketing company to redesign your website give your web marketing efforts an overhaul. You've been looking at competitors' websites and the sites of companies that you respect and admire. Then the design phase of your project starts. Just what you've been waiting for! You're so excited to get a new, modern look to your website. You're sick of the current, dated aesthetic.
When the new design comps through for review, you pour over them critiquing every pixel. IT MUST LOOK PERFECT! Finally, the design is approved and the project moves on to the next phase, content. Guess what happens... you lose interest. Without fail! This happens in nearly 100% of small businesses.
The content phase just doesn't feel as sexy as the design phase. I get it. I do. The problem is, the content is the more important of the 2 phases.
The look and feel of your website is very important in building trust with your visitors. It's also really important from an ease of use standpoint. Good design makes finding what you're after extremely easy. Good design shows that you care about what potential clients see when they look for you. Ultimately, TRUST is the the biggest factor with design in Inbound Marketing. You can't expect strangers to stick around long if your site's design doesn't build trust and deliver the content your visitor is looking for.
However... CONTENT is what actually gets visitors to your website. Then they stick around if the design is trustworthy and the content matches what they are looking for. The effort that goes into the design phase of your website should be monumentally surpassed by the effort that goes into the content creation portion of your website redesign. I know the design phase is the sexy part, but if you care at all about generating high quality traffic that converts into high quality leads, you need a more concerted effort on content than you do the design.
Why is that? For starters, prospects don't Google for the vendor in your industry with the best website design. They Google for a solution to their problem. If your competitor's site answers that more effectively but looks a little less attractive than yours, the visitor won't know. All they will know is that they found a solution to their problem, the competitor's site was acceptable in design and now they are on the path to become the competitor's customer, not yours.
The bottom line is, no one will see your beautifully designed website if you don't build out the content appropriately.
Again, I recommend shifting the bulk of your energy from the design phase to the content phase if you are truly trying to attract visitors to your website that ultimately convert to leads and customers. At the end of the day, that's the goal for the vast majority of small businesses online.
