I know every site owner thinks that they could improve their own site. Your content could be more compelling to convince visitors to buy or visit more often. The look of your site could be a bit more polished. The functionality of your site could improve with various scripts. Also if only your site was search engine friendly to get more traffic to your site.
When you decided to make improvements to your site which one is more important?
Depending who you ask I am sure you will get a different answer on which one is a priority. When it comes to sites I believe that order of priorities are functionality (programming), design, content and then search engine optimization in that order.
What order would your priorities be and why?
Dr. Cossack
October 6, 2007 1:09 pm
I’d say that content takes priority over design: if your content is really worth it, the users will dive in and navigate through a messy website. Obviously though, you can’t neglect that aspect.
That’s probably one of my weakpoints when it comes to websites: I have a hard time balancing everything to get the best result.
Collin
October 6, 2007 8:34 pm
Design is huge in my books, right above content. It has to be cause if readers comes to your site and its hard to foloow or the colors don’t match or what ever they will get annoyed reading your site and move on. Design and layout should be the first thing you work on, then content then SEO.
jentekk
October 6, 2007 10:36 pm
For me, it’s a 3 way tie. I believe functionality, design and content have to be equally great. If you sacrifice one, you sacrifice the integrity of the whole site.
On Design:
“Fifty milliseconds — the equivalent of 1/20th of a second — is how much time a website has to make a good first impression on surfers” according to a new Canadian study in the British Journal: Behaviour and Information Technology.
Most visitors won’t even think twice about leaving a messy (ugly or broken) website – even if it means walking away from the very information they were looking for. It comes down to ‘trust’. If a website structure (functionality) and design isn’t good, how can a visitor trust that the content is any good.
At JenTekk, I like to be sure my clients’ sites function in the latest versions of the popular browsers, draw their visitors in with beautiful graphics, and highly organized layout, plenty of whitespace… and then reward them with intelligent and relevant web copy.
SEO is definitely secondary to those 3.
blogadmin
October 6, 2007 10:39 pm
You took the safe answer.
What if my budget would only allow me to improve one?
Collin
October 7, 2007 6:59 am
Then work on content. Happy readers are betterthen no readers
jentekk
October 7, 2007 3:30 pm
You’re right. My answer is safe, probably because my approach to website development is (hopefully) safe. I don’t take risks, such as skimping on one factor of the site’s development (ie: functionality, or content) in order to place more time and labour on another factor (ie: design).
I feel (and here is where I could be wrong) that a website is only as strong as it’s weakest element (functionality, content, or design).
Design is no more important than content, and content is no more important than design. ( I’ve seen/heard all the arguments for both cases — and they’ve been more an argument of ego.) I feel that one is not as effective without the other.
If my client has a website that breaks in several browsers, is unorganized and unsettling to look at, and she thinks that sinking some bucks into webcopy is going to increase her sales, I’d feel compelled to let her know that chances are, her visitors won’t even stick around to get to the ‘new and improved’ copy. Stat’s prove this. I’d make a recommendation to approach her website’s improvement strategy from another angle.
Safe? You bet! :)
jentekk
October 7, 2007 3:39 pm
This may be true if there were only a few websites offering the same content that you are offering. They may take the time to look, in hopes of finding what they need.
But now with literally hundreds of thousands of other websites spoon feeding the same content to their visitors (a well laid out website can do this) and visitors expecting to be spoon fed, you will lose your visitors to the competition.
Most visitors are in a hurry. They don’t want to dig for information, they want all the information they can get in the shortest amount of time.
Spoon feeding! ;)