How Lack of Marketing Content Can Derail Your Website Redesign Project

What comes first – site content or site design? In the words of Jeffrey Zeldman, the renowned web designer, blogger, independent publisher and the king of Web standards according to Business Week, “Content precedes design. Design in the absence of content is not design, it’s decoration.”

Are you involved in or responsible for redesigning your company’s website? Is your website redesign project on hold waiting for marketing to deliver content? If so, you know the frustration.

It doesn’t matter whether you work for a corporate marketing department or the owner of a website for a small business. You spend countless hours, weeks and months working with the site designers developing site maps, wireframes and mock ups – but content? It is relegated to the bottom of the totem pole of deliverables. As a result, your dream web redesign project comes to a screeching halt.

I kid you not, one of our website redesign projects has been on hold for over a year waiting for site content. Why? Because the client claimed, “they could handle the content themselves.” This is not an isolated case based on my 12 years of experience designing business websites.

The site redesign cycle of frustration

Here’s a typical site redesign scenario:

Our current site is more than 3 years old > Let’s do a redesign > Review new design mock ups > Love that cool new look with the scrolling thingies > Let’s launch the new site ASAP > What’s that “lorem ipsum dolor sit amet” on our pages? > Oh, we need content, okay let’s just copy & paste from our old marketing collateral.

Six months later, very little traffic, even fewer leads and no sales > The new web site sucks, hasn’t done anything for our business.

Situation turns dire until someone within the company gets an epiphany, “Our site is not optimized” > Quick, call in that SEO expert who guarantees first page ranking in Google > Before you know it, you are locked in a 6-month search engine optimization contract.

To rescue your website and deliver you to the Promised Land, the SEO consultant wants you to generate loads of content optimized for keywords and phrases.

And the cycle of frustration continues. Poor results stemming from bad or no content strategy and focusing solely on the design aspects.

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That’s all for today. Thanks for taking the time to read Marketing Matters regularly. See you next month!

Best regards,
Achinta Mitra