Great content, great website

More often than not when I am approached to design and develop a website for a client the most important aspect of the site—the content—has been largely overlooked, barely given a second thought.

Instead, there is a tendency to focus too much on how it looks, and more specifically, the aesthetics. Web design is much more than making something look nice although a website that looks great is the end result we strive for.

A website's aesthetics can be very subjective. Not everyone likes the same colours or colour combinations, for example. The choice of typeface might also not be to everyone's taste, although at the very least it should be legible and properly set.

The vast majority of visitors to your website are not there to admire its looks, to swoon at the colour palette. They are there with a specific purpose. They are looking for someone to design a website, to build a house, to book a boat trip, you name it. Your job is to provide the information they need and my job as a web designer is to present this information in a way that enables them to achieve the goal of their visit (and yours as a site owner) as easily as possible. This is an over simplification as we will work together an all aspects of the site but you get the point.

Hire a professional

Of course this doesn't mean that the aesthetics of your website aren't important—of course they are—just that they shouldn't be your primary focus from the outset. It's easier to fuss over the wrong shade of purple than to produce quality content, and this is probably why it happens.

If you don't have time to work on the content consider hiring someone to write it on your behalf. Even if you do have time but budget allows it's worth considering.

The same goes for photography. Again too many times I'm provided with poor quality photography. Photos that are out of focus, underexposed, overexposed, poorly composed. Hiring a professional photographer can be the difference between attracting customers or losing them to competitors, so they can easily end up paying for themselves and the photographs themselves will be a long term investment.

As part of my web design service I can introduce you to copywriters and photographers that are high quality and reasonably priced.

Remember, high quality content and photography can transform an average looking website into a great one.