Internet Marketing Priorities: Why Design Shouldn’t Be First

Writing by Nick Stamoulis Tweet

To really create an effective Internet marketing campaign there are fours areas that need a lot of focus and a lot of carefully-thought-out detail:

* The Color Design and Presentation of A Web Site
* The Navigation of a Web Site
* The Copy/Web Content
* The Optimization Strategy(ies)

Allow me to prioritize these for you:

1. Copy/Content
2. Navigation
3. Optimization
4. Design

It might seem kind of strange that an SEO would put optimization next to last on the list of priorities, but there is a reason for that.

What it all boils down to is your content is what sells. It does no good to get 500 million people to visit your site if it doesn’t sell them on your product or service. That’s why you must focus on building great content that sells. I’d rather close sales on 10 percent of 50 visitors than 0 percent of 200,000. Focus on content first.

Once you’re sure you have your content well-written and sales focused, work on your navigation. Again, this is something your site visitors will notice. If they can’t find what they’re looking for quickly and easily then they will leave. The result will be no sales. It’s almost as important as content. Definitely more important than design.

Search engine optimization is the science of optimizing your web copy using keywords and links so that you attract the attention of search engines who index your pages accordingly. It’s important if you want traffic, but as stated before, you can get all the traffic you want and if your content doesn’t sell, who cares?

It is rather odd, I think, that most people focus on design. They’ve got it backward. A pretty website with no sales is just a pretty website, but an ugly website that makes sales gets prettier by the dollar. My compliments to Chris McElroy on that one. The point is this: Design can make your website pretty, and there’s nothing wrong with a pretty website, but content is still what sells; navigation is still what helps your visitors find what they are looking for; and SEO is what helps the search engines index you appropriately. Get your priorities right and you’ll do well online. Get them wrong and you’ll just have another pretty website.