Sometimes, it is okay to have a poorly designed website. So long as our contents are good, nothing beats that. Of course, the site might not be able to capture a good first impression for the visitors. But when it does, it brings the visitors back again and again even… I would refer my friends to go for that site for their contents.
Physical Business
What am I trying to say here? In many business friends I had encountered, there are people who tend to spend a lot of money to renovate their offices, get better packaging for their products, employ expensive technology to handle customer service and spending even more money to make sure that they look good in front of everybody out there. At the end of the day, they do get new customers like any other business. However, their breakeven point is taking too long to keep the business alive… And in the end, they are facing business closure.
Website Business
Well, the above paragraph I was talking about is the result of a physical business which is a magnified version of doing a website business. You might not realize the problem in your own website when you started to overspend your budget. At the end of the day, it is the sales that count. And the gist of getting that sale in a website is to create good contents for your visitors to come back again and again. It is also to attract the search engines to bring new visitors for us to handle. A well-designed website with pretty much lousy contents can be quite turned off.
Blog Business
On the other hand, blog industry is somehow a little different from website industry. Although a blog is still a website, blog is something more than that. It is more personal than just being another serious website contents. Blog is the voice of our thoughts where we can just think as we type freely and produce a very personal yet quality contents. In blog, quality means something personal which actually expresses itself to your readers indirectly. (I learned this from Jon in my previous post.) It focuses more towards the many activities that you can engage in your own site. It is like a “half-duplex” communication version of a web forum. But blog do allows comments to support the blog topics. It is half-duplex because it may not allow readers to post a blog content, except when you actually allow guest blogging in your site.
Content Advisors
When I first stepped into the Internet industry, many people kept on telling me that Internet is all about contents. Keep focusing on the contents, and you should be on the right track. I believe that a lot when I first hear it from many people around like my friend, Roger, who is already making $300 a day. And my other friend Christian who seems to be doing pretty well too with his pretty high page rank and high readership. And yet another I just got to know online called Sunny but he has stopped blogging for his studies when he is already making over $1000 a month…
Hearing from these people who are a step ahead of me, you could well be motivated like myself to start working hard towards contents more than your site design. Anyway, Google’s initial web design is pretty much plain and neat without much graphical disturbance… This is something we can learn from where we almost go back to google for more content search where Google keeps on trying its very best to maintain high quality contents to be displayed on their site.
A Website (Be It whether it is using a blog program or not.)
A site which uses a blog program, might not be a blog necessarily. That webmaster might be leveraging on its power to contribute his articles in the website. And when your site contents are following very closely to the theme, you should be on the right track.
A Blog
A true blog with a theme is somehow a little different. Blogging is another way of expressing yourself. It gives your readers quality contents surrounding the theme of your site, and also your own interest and about your life even. People are simply interested in what you are doing and how you live. It is a personal journal for your readers to learn about you and hear about what you have to say about quality contents at your personal level.
Choosing a niche, not a category
I think I have not found anybody who is able to tell me exactly what a niche is all about. Many would keep on saying that “this is a good niche”, or they would just say “you have to find a niche in your website”, or else they would say “this niche is too crowded already”. In the end, I tried to go for a certain niche, and if you have been catching what I have been blogging, I start to get myself into trouble understanding what a niche is all about.
It can be quite hard to know your niche right from the start. When you are just starting out, finding out about your niche, what you realize is that you are choosing a category, not a niche! For example, I can choose on a topic called “Cars”. And if I continue to blog along, I will realize that I can talk a lot about “BMW Cars”! That sounds good news right? However, what you didn’t realize is that you are still talking about cars on a broad topic. The kind of traffic you might attract is probably people who don’t know about cars mostly. They come upon your site and start to hear what you have to say just because you talk about BMW which they might want to know. But let’s say your targeted traffic happens to be BMW spare parts enthusiasts… These traffic might prove to be a mistake since they are not going to buy spare parts from you… They don’t know anything about cars in fact! As rich people they could be, they just want to buy a BMW for their comfort…
In my opinion, a niche is the sub-category of a certain category that you want to dig into. And if you can dig into second level or third level of that category, you are on your way to find out your own niche pretty soon! Dig up to a stage where you can’t really dig into even more categories… That’s your niche! And of course, while you might be a “specialist” in that niche, you can still talk about the parent topics of your niche… Why not? So long as your readers know that you belong to this niche, nobody will penalize you for that!
Poorly Designed Websites
In my opinion, websites need not have to look uniquely different from others anymore.
- So long as the contents are visible,
- not so eye-hurting in the colors, or
- just a simple pleasant-looking website,
it shouldn’t be a problem after all.
On the other hand again, if you have a really good traffic for your site or you have a business plan to follow strictly, there is nothing wrong with a really nice web design! Right?
Conclusion
Let’s just face it. Contents are hotly pursued by the people online as well as the many other websites (for their search engine business, article business, social bookmarking business, etc). At the very basic level, nobody will care if you have a good design or not. It is just the impression that you are giving to your visitors about you, not your contents. So make the best balance of both design and contents, and try not to overspend on design and burn your pockets out of it!
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