Good Content Vs. Good Design
Regardless of the size of your audience, premium content is a necessity. Helping your visitors solve problems and find answers to questions helps establish your brand as an expert in your industry. That trust factor eventually turns your website visitors into leads, or even better…customers! The problem is that some marketers have this idea mixed up. Creating excellent looking sites is great for presentation, but design is NOT what will sell your products. Every brand needs well written supporting content to bring in leads. Read how to build your audience here. Both are definitely important. Excellent content looks bland without any color or visual appeal, and if your site design has no real substance, your visitors won’t be coming back. To keep it simple, content should come first and design should come second.
CONTENT FIRST
Its easy to get caught up designing every aspect of your site, but can your content stand on its own? Consider this: If your house looks beautiful outside, but the foundation is unstable…what’s going to happen? Its better to focus on content first before it all comes crashing down. Creative content also becomes easier to insert when everything is planned out.
CONTENT INFLUENCES DESIGN
As a creative agency, we are often asked to create a visual mockup or template to show the client as a reference for inserting content. Sounds like a good idea right? Wrong. Here are 2 reasons why:
1. LIMITING YOURSELF AND YOUR CONTENT
Why should every piece of content look the same? Should every section of your site be limited to 150 words? Its just not reasonable to limit your amount content based on visual appeal. These template based sites are not user friendly and leave your visitors constantly searching for answers. Feel free to place creative content and visuals to support your content, but don’t just limit yourself to the dimensions set by your template purchased on Themeforest.
2. ADJUSTMENTS TO CONTENT LEAD TO ADJUSTMENTS OF DESIGN
Even when a template is used, the content itself should primarily determine how the final product will be constructed. Consider adding content to an existing ebook for example. Adding that one paragraph may not look like a huge change, but all the text below it have moved down. Some pages may now be cut off and extended further than anticipated. While this may not seem like a big deal on the surface, imagine having your website content break due to having “too much” content that the template required. 
TIME IS MONEY
We are serious! Businesses and freelancers alike. If you have to make any major edits to copy content after it has gone to design, you are throwing you money out the window. When you adjust content on your site after a project has moved onto design, you are likely to tack on extra hours not previously anticipated. Plus, what about the hours already spent on content creation? The ripple down of issues is something your wallet and your company isn’t ready for.
THE BOTTOM LINE
Don’t let your Return on Investment (ROI) be affected by countless rounds of revision. Plan to build your site with premium content from the start. Good content always should come before good design. 
Quiksnip is a social media marketing agency based in Los Angeles, California. They provide administrative assistance to startups trying to grow their online presence.