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03/27/02
Content Above All
by Jennifer Trewitt
It seems like there's always a new fad showing up in website design. I can remember back when the fad was that you had to have a picture or logo of some sort on your site, rather than just black text on a white page. Obviously the Internet has changed greatly since then, but that seems to be one of the few fads that has become mainstream and proven it's effectiveness - after all, what site has no graphic design at all today?
Other styles, however, have come and gone with an inappropriate amount of hoopla. Counters are an excellent example - for a year or so, having a counter on your site (counting the number of "hits" or visitors to the site) was a sign that you were confident of your site and your traffic. Industry rumors predicted that a counter would become as basic as contact info or a logo. However, these days it's rare to find a corporate site with a counter on it anywhere, let alone prominently displayed. Counters still show up frequently on home or hobby pages, where they may (or may not, since they all calculate differently and can be set to larger numbers) indicate the popularity of the site. But display a counter on a corporate site and you immediately label yourself as amateurish and possibly even unprofessional.
In the process of "keeping up with the IBM's" a site may have been redesigned any number of times, to include a flash intro, flash design, frames, no frames, pop-out menus, photographs integrated into the design, no photographs in the main design . . . I could keep going. It seems impossible to have a site design that appears cutting edge for any length of time. So what is the formula for creating a website that will draw customers?
Interestingly enough, the answer is "none of the above." The bottom line is, most online buyers and researchers could care less what your site looks like. What they want to know is "can I find what I'm looking for here, and how hard will it be?" Certainly a site's design is a part of that - buttons for different pages should be easy to find and identify, for example. But whether the menu is constant or pops out at you really doesn't matter, unless of course you're using a computer or operating system that doesn't read pop-outs. Then you never see most of the menu at all.
When I do a Competitive Analysis for a business, I check the appearance of competing sites. After I check their content, information, interactivity, ease of use, search optimization, contact information, customer service, policy availability and pricing. All of those things matter more to customers. Within the industry, developers who complain to each other will occasionally mention a design that they find really atrocious, but I've never seen an opinion like that make the email rounds. What does grab our attention is the story of going to a newspaper site that has a search function only for headlines, or an electronics shopping cart that doesn't have any information on compatibility. It's all about content.
In fact, industry analysts have started to catch on to the information idea - there are a number of commercials out right now stressing the importance of content, which is a good sign that someone's been writing lots of articles about it. And I have the feeling that for the first time in a number of years, the style-of-the-day may be around for awhile. I can't imagine that we'll ever go back to black-and-white, text-only sites, and I believe that useful, easy-to-find content will be even more important than graphics, ten years down the road.
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