Traffic Before Design

Some casual readers may bump into some of my websites and think “yikes” – this is supposed to be an innovative marketing company? The truth is – in “content heavy” marketing projects I prefer to focus on that rather than design, as a person who has my hand in literally dozens of projects a year I find that I do my best work and leak off the least amount of time if I concentrate on my main priorities when building a website – structure, content, and visibility.

It’s easy to get excited about the potential a project may have and fire off a fast investment for a modern “2.0 design” (if I never hear that phrase again I’ll be just fine with it).  However, it’s even easier to make structure and layout changes early into the project and when that happens more money and time needs to be spent fixing the design, potentially all before the project has any traction.

For those reasons and a few more, I concentrate on building the backbone of my sites first – “the guts” as I like to call it.  The advantages are far more than what I implied above, as anyone with any experience in today’s world of online search marketing knows (which mind you is VERY different than the world of even just a few months ago) one aspect all websites need to gain trust in the eyes of users and search engines is time.  Well, time AND a lot more useful content than the result above you anyways.

My recommendation to anyone interested in my style of positioning in the search engines is to concentrate on the bigger plan first, and then wait until you are experiencing a decent amount of traffic before hiring a designer.

Remember, designing can be a very time consuming process, even if outsourced, but designing a fancy website will not help you gain any visibility in the search engines.

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