Every project starts the same way. A kickoff call, a brief discussion of goals, and then forty-five minutes about whether the heading is a touch too blue. I have run this loop for years now and I am ready to say the quiet part out loud.
What you say matters more than how it looks.
The phrase has a dozen flavors. Substance over style. Form follows function. Content is king. Pick the one that lands for you. They are all pointing at the same load-bearing idea: a website is mostly words doing work. The design is the stage. The words are the actor on it.
The two audiences who do not care what your site looks like
Two audiences read every page on your website. Only one of them has eyes.
The first is a human visitor. They land on the page, scan for about eight seconds, and decide whether to keep going. What they are scanning for is not your color palette. They are looking for a sentence that answers what does this business do and is it for me. If that sentence is there, the visit continues. If it is not, the prettiest hero in the world will not save you.
The second is a search crawler. It is a piece of software. It does not see your site. It reads the HTML, parses your headings, indexes your paragraphs, and decides what your page is about. Margins do not show up in the index. Words do.
Both audiences want the same thing - useful, specific, well-organized text. The visual polish is a bonus that helps the human stay, and it does nothing at all for the bot.
I came up through design. I am not anti-design.
This is the part where I disclose my bias. I started out as a designer. Print first, then web, then product. I love type, I love grids, I love the feeling of a layout that locks together. If I tell you the design carries less weight than the copy, it is not because I do not value design. It is because I have watched the bill come due on too many projects where we spent three weeks debating buttons and three days writing the page they sat on.
The hierarchy I land on, over and over, looks like this:
- Say a clear thing in real words. Most of the lift comes from this step. It is also the step most projects skip.
- Structure the words so the page can be skimmed. Real headings, short paragraphs, scannable lists. This is design work, but it is content-first design work.
- Polish the visual surface. This is where the typical branding conversation lives. It is the third step, not the first, and it gets faster the more solid the first two are.
Done in that order, design becomes a multiplier on something real. Done in the wrong order, you spend the budget polishing an empty room.
A friendly poke at my own industry
I will say this gently because most of my friends are designers. Designers design for other designers.
Open the design awards sites for a minute. Heroic typography. Animations that took someone a week to build. Most of those sites also have a phone number that takes three scrolls to find, copy written like an art-school thesis, and a navigation pattern that requires a tutorial. They are beautiful. They are also frequently bad at being websites.
It is the same dynamic you see in any creative field. The peer group becomes the audience, and the real audience is somewhere else. If you have ever watched a chef plate something tiny and exquisite that left you hungry, you have seen the same thing happen on a dinner plate.
The polite truth about everyone, including me
And on the other side of the industry, the harder thing to say nicely: most people's sense of what looks good is not great. I include myself in the early years of my career. I include 90 percent of the websites I see when I open a list of local businesses. I include the slide deck someone in your accounting department made last week.
This is not an insult. Design taste is a skill, and like every skill it takes time and repetition to develop. The average person has not had thirty thousand hours of practice looking at typography or laying out grids. So when a client says can we make it pop?, what they often mean is something more like I want this page to feel as exciting to me as the website does for the brand I am secretly trying to copy. That is a real instinct. It is not a design specification.
What this means for those of us in the field is that we are usually building for an audience whose taste is, charitably, undeveloped. The good news is that the same audience is also not judging your design at the level you think they are. They are looking for the phone number and a sentence that explains the service. Get those right and the design can be tasteful and quiet, and the same audience will think your site is great.
The tough pill: sometimes bad design converts better
Here is the part of this argument my designer friends do not want to hear. Some businesses do better with a website that looks like it was DIYed in 2007.
Think of the mom-and-pop shop with the Comic Sans logo and the GIF flames across the top of the page. Think of the contractor whose site looks like an MS Publisher project that escaped containment. Think of the family restaurant whose menu PDF is a scanned photograph of a printed sheet. These sites convert. Not in spite of looking the way they look. Because of it.
The design is doing real work. It is signaling: this is a real person, who has been around a while, who is investing in the actual service instead of in marketing polish. For the right audience, that is a feature. A boomer searching for a roofer wants to find a roofer with a worn-in site and a phone number that will get answered, not a Squarespace startup with a hero illustration. The crappy site is closer to the truth.
The same pattern shows up in generational design taste. Comic Sans, Minion memes, the WordArt-flavored church bulletin all read as bad to the design community and as warm and familiar to entire generations. Aesthetic signals belong to the audience, not the designer. I will personally cringe at the Comic Sans choice every time, and the business will still do fine.
A related hot take: I would take Comic Sans over an AI logo
While we are here, a related opinion I will probably catch heat for. Given two options:
- A homemade Comic Sans logo with a slightly-too-big clip-art star on it
- A glossy AI-generated logo with smooth gradients and a swooshing leaf icon
I will pick the Comic Sans one every single time. It has charm. It has a human behind it. It says I made this. The AI logo says I asked a robot for a logo and it gave me one. The first one tells me something true about the business. The second one tells me nothing.
I have a longer hot take on the whole AI-design space sitting over at where I draw the line on AI design. The short version: I am not anti-AI for small businesses with no budget. I am anti-AI for replacing the part of the work that is supposed to feel human.
What this looks like in practice
I am not saying ship something ugly. I am saying ship something useful, and the bar for useful is far lower than the bar for design-award winning. I wrote a whole separate piece on this idea over at launch day is version one. The short version: the only question that matters at launch is whether the new thing is better than what you have right now. Not whether it is perfect. Not whether every shade has been signed off. Better than current. Ship it.
The practical hierarchy for any page on your site:
- Write the headline first. Make it specific. If a stranger read only that sentence, would they know what the page is about?
- Write the body next. Real sentences. Tell the reader what the thing is, who it is for, and what to do next.
- Decide the layout from the content. The content tells you what kind of layout it needs, not the other way around.
- Visual polish, last. Type pairing, spacing, color. A good designer can make almost any clear page look good. No designer can make a vague page useful.
The summary, with one more meme
Crawlers cannot see. Most visitors do not look closely. The thing that does the real work of communicating what your business is and why someone should care is, almost always, the words. Design supports the words. The words have to be there first.
If you are about to spend three weeks debating a hero image, take ten minutes and write the headline that goes over it. You will save yourself two of those weeks and end up with a page that does its job.