Website Design Or Content: Which Should You Do First?
If you’re a business owner looking to expand your presence in the digital space, the first action you’ll probably take is to build a website that showcases your products or services. During the development phase, you’ll most likely come up with lots of ideas on how you want your website to look and function.
Once you’ve established the design of your site, you’ll probably start focusing on filling it with content related to your business. Although this method seems like an effective and straightforward approach, prioritising web design over the content and vice versa can actually lead to numerous problems.
These issues could impact the overall development of your site, or worse, they could interfere with its functionality and interface, which can also affect your conversion rates.
So when it comes to building a website, which should come first? Design or content?
In this article, we’ll tackle the common problems of prioritising one over the other and guide you on how you can manage both to create a well-balanced site.
Challenges With The Design-First Approach
Unfortunately, going down this path increases your risk of adding simple fillers instead of well-thought-out content.
Since you’ve focused too much on the site’s appearance, you might be tempted to skip out on producing high-quality and engaging content to avoid messing up the website’s layout.
Although this method can still work to some degree, putting out low-quality content might turn some of your visitors off because they are not able to find the right type of content that addresses their needs.
Challenges With The Content-First Approach
On the other hand, focusing too much on content before working on a website’s design can also cause a few problems.
Even if you’ve managed to churn out highly engaging articles, page copies, and product images or videos, your site’s navigability might still suffer if your content doesn’t perfectly match your preferred layout and design of your website.
For instance, some of your content might not appear properly if they’re not optimised for mobile devices.
According to a study on user experience by Baymard Institute, site visitors tend to remember issues they encountered more than a website’s appearance.
In most cases, these issues are caused by improperly placed or formatted content, which can affect how users interact with a site.
Similar to the problems associated with a design-first approach, navigability problems caused by poorly planned content can cause users to leave a website before performing the desired action.
Blending Website Design And Content
The best way to achieve a perfect balance of content and web design is to incorporate the former into the early stages of the latter.
This means that while you’re starting to conceptualise your website’s appearance and layout, you should also begin strategising the creation of your content.
That way, you’ll be able to add or customise design elements that blend well with your content and vice versa.
Ideally, the creation of a roadmap should be done with your web design and contention creation teams.
By working together, they’ll be able to come up with content and design elements that go well with each other.
At Digital Marketing Bee, one of our main web design and development principles is to build websites that are fully functional and user-friendly.
This means optimising the site to ensure that it looks good, is easy to navigate, and contains content that blends well with the website’s design.
Through these elements, we are able to deliver websites that are primed for conversions. If you’re looking to boost your business’ digital growth, get in touch with us to learn how you can benefit from our services.
