What makes a website perform like it should? Well, to begin, the design is important. Then there is the content. And of course, we cannot overlook SEO, both on-page and off site. This is just the simplified version though—what really makes a high performance website is all of the hard work that goes into it.
Speaking of all of this hard work, there’s an important balance that must be achieved. For our purposes here, we’ll call it the 80/20 rule of high performance websites.
What is the 80/20 rule of high performance websites?
It’s simple. 80% of the site is the content. That leaves the remaining 20% being the site’s design itself. A common sense SEO approach kind of needs to overlay the entire 100%.
Does this sound a little astray from the normal website design philosophy to you? Well, if it does, that’s because it is different from the norm. Most folks get really stuck on the design portion of their websites—making what should be the 20% to be the 80%, if you will. But the thing is, it’s not the design that brings in traffic or converts visitors to buyers…it is the website’s content that does all of that.
So, is the design still important?
Yes, please don’t get us wrong here, the website design is still extremely important as the 20% of the equation that it is. A mission-supportive design can completely make or break the message that the content must deliver. Good design equals better visitor attention. Bad site design is just a turn-off and sends visitors flocking away from the site.
So, again, design is extremely important—but it’s only a part of the overall equation. Many people really get caught up in getting the design absolutely perfect. It can be an endless circle. But the thing is, while they have the ideally designed visual and functional masterpiece of a design, in the end, without substantial quality content, the design alone will produce very few results if any.
It’s the quality content that makes all of the good things happen for a website. The design is there to support this cause (and certainly not to detract from it). Here in the San Jose, San Mateo, and San Francisco Bay Area, WSpider has been effectively and efficiently producing results for our clients using this 80/20 philosophy for years; our technology-forward approach to SEM and SEO really helps too. Can we help you achieve the right content/design balance for your website?
