Content is King. Bill Gate’s essay of 1996 is only holding true for a few select companies that make money from selling content, whilst many of the new generation of internet startups are moving towards interaction rather than content.

Why do I mention this? Because on a small scale, every individual’s website and every business website still needs good content. After eight years in the business, I’m still surprised by the number of business websites that don’t have good, timely content. Many businesses seem satisfied with a static website, with content that never or rarely changes. Our experience is that for non e-Commerce sites, content gets updated perhaps once or twice a year.

To keep websites popular they need to be sticky. Stickiness means that people keep coming back. This keeps them alive and notable to search engines. Customer relationships aren’t cultivated on websites that never get updated. This is even more essential for websites that support or serve a community. And, yes, I’ve seen such websites that just stand still.

When you have a business website, you need to look after it. It’s a unique opportunity to keep in contact with all your current and prospective customers, partners and suppliers. From a marketing perspective, it’s extraordinarily cheap to run. According to the strapline of Naked Conversations, blogs are changing the way businesses talk with customers. Blogs are content too.

So what about design? In our experience, everyone cares about design: websites need to look good and make a memorable impression. Some customers have clear ideas about what the design should look like and how certain parts of the site should behave. Asking people for useful initial content is usually more problematic. The surprise in all of this is that it’s the content they should know about and care about, not the design. We provide the look and feel, the layout, the colours, fonts, graphics, interactivity, web statistics. Leave it all to us. Please, because we still receive invitations to tender where the emphasis is on all of this and not the content.

Whenever we start a website, we need to know what the content will be and how it will grow or evolve. The disappointing fact is that when we start a website, it’s usually the content we know least about. And it’s the content that our customers are least willing or able to supply. We always tell our customers: give us as much information as you can about your business. We need to immerse ourselves in the business being represented, and in some cases we end up being de facto partners.

The content of a website has remarkable consequences on its design. You simply cannot start designing a website without knowing what content will be placed within it. Adherence to the principle of separation of concerns minimises this problem on larger sites, but for a small development that cannot be supported by, for example, a content management system, this isn’t practicable. Without clear direction the whole development process is lengthened, requiring more iterations between design and content. Indeed, some websites may end up having places for content but no content, but it’s the content that counts. It’s always the content that counts.