The Chicken or the Egg – Content or Design

By |2016-10-12T16:51:07-07:00July 14th, 2015|General|

Recently, I have had a couple of interesting conversations with some friends who are either interested in redesigning their website or have clients who are doing the same. And, with the trend of flashy and feature-rich WordPress themes popping up left and right, it seems that many people are getting distracted by these “bright and shiny” options to help revitalize their websites or create a new, rich experience online. But, in my opinion, these themes can be distractions on what should be the core focus on any site, the content. So which should come first? The content or design? Some of the "hot" new design trends are capturing attention. For example, it is quite easy to get caught up in the "responsive" design of new themes. Actually, it's quite a good feature to have if you are thinking about reworking your website. Responsive means that your site will scale, hopefully elegantly, to different sized screens and devices. Google search algorithms now look closely at if a site is "mobile friendly" or not and responsive design helps with that check-box. But then come things like parallax, where an image seems to magically stick in the background of a page while the content on top of it scrolls by. It's fancy, it's glitzy, it's eye-catching. And some of the newer themes available for purchase have gobs of elaborate interactive designs, well worth the price of the themes. But as I said, it is easy to get caught up in the design hype. But if you don't have the content to back it up, your design is meaningless. It's like putting lipstick on a pig. It's All About the Content I recently redesigned HighTechDad.com with [...]