Yes. Yes they do…

I think the design is important but no where near as important as the content (relative to the time put into it). As long as the design isn’t horrible, then people won’t care. So a simple and clean design with great content will win out over a award winning design with poor content.

“What is it that gets visitors to your Web site to stay there, browsing, looking and buying? Is it the design? Is it the layout? No, it’s the CONTENT”

I totally agree with you that content is the key—it’s crucial. However, the first thing you see when you visit a website is the DESIGN—this is your first impression. Therefore, I think Design is equally important from another business model standpoint. So, instead of Content vs Design, lets have “Content & Design” = a win-win.

Always interesting to see clients running around changing colour shades by degrees. I feel bad for the designers, honestly. One thing is fore sure, though, if client education simply made the point you’re making above – there would be many less headaches around the office.

I was recently reading an article on this exact topic called What comes first, design or content?(something I could show to clients for development projects, in advance of the design process), the author notes that he, “suspect[s] this is because website owners are so entrenched in their own business and its intricacies that they take this for granted and focus instead on how the site is going to look rather than what the site may need to accomplish – the goals.”

Interesting and true! Thanks for the article, I think I’ll be using some of your pointers (in addition to the ones I found in the article) next time I decide to do some client edumacating :).

Best Regards,
Esposito

Most part of visitors comes to my web site via google. If my web pages wouldn’t be optimized and focused around keyword phrase, in other words title meta tag and heading 1 tag are the theme of my web pages.

So quality, focused, informational, interesting, useful, provocative and well written content around one theme gets my visitors to my web pages. But professional web design and informational architecture also gets visitors.

Web design is not only fancy graphics, it consists of informational architecture. If informational architecture within web design is poor, content also becomes poor and with little less quality.

Wrong, google algo is far more complex and it’s algo does care much about web design especially informational architecture.

If you would pay much more attention to web design and informational architecture your traffic would increased, for sure no doubt.

Content is king but web design is queen. Content is far more easily digestible with great web design.

Yes, I agree with you becuase we all know that Content is King. But Design is also important to catch the visitors attension when they visited first time your blog or website. A quality informative content+good design is success formula for any website.

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This is just one example but there are dozens of other factors beyond content and layout, but networking and communications is a big MUST for recurring visitors. Communications could include adding a subscription option to your blog. This again ties in with “content”:the trump. If your content is great, your readers will subcribe to it with one of many subscription plugins for wordpress. Networking the counterpart to that category could include social media networking sites like twitter, facebook, myspace, and youtube. Meeting like-minded people on social platforms like those is a must in developing long lasting friendships and relationships. These “buddies” you make are sure to visit your blog often if infact they are like minded people. Networking and Comunications is just scratching the surface but there are many facets to consider when gaining trusted and recurring visitors to your blog.

I enjoyed your post, and i hope you enjoy my feedback.

Cheers,
-Jonny CEO Pocketbook Promotions & author of Pocketbook Promotions: The Blog.

One thing I thought of, however, is that you want to be careful in getting free themes and templates. Most of them are not developed to perfection. This is important now because Google seems to care how well your site performs (we’ve run a few tests to suggest that all things being equal, the faster site wins in the results).

Great post!

Having said that content is what brings people back. People search for information or entertainment – both come in the form of content.

The content should be easy to access and well-presented but if the content is poor no amount of great design can make up for it. Imagine visiting a beautifully laid out blog that hasn’t been updated in six months; what are the chances that you’ll hit the subscribe button?

Great content can however, overcome poor or uninspiring design.

If the content was extremely superb, I’d subscribe to the RSS feeds instead.