What is more important Content or Design?

[Alan Smith]

We all know that content is the king. So we can say that it plays a vital role in online success. But web design is equally essential for a successful website. If content is the soul of the website then unquestionably appearance is the body. It is difficult to decide which one is most important in website designing. If you write a good content without an appealing look and vice versa then both are useless to attract the visitors. Both are equally important to attract the customers and increase the more traffic to a website.

What do you think about this?

[endre]

I think (no expert) that content is most important for authority sites. The reason for this is that you can create a popular site with a less than optimal design, but if you have less than optimal content you will not get visitors back.
For affiliate sales sites, where the most important thing is to get the visitor to the product site, content might not be as important, if you manage to rank high in Google without it.

Endre

[francophile]

Unique quality content is vital for SEO, visitors and repeat visitors. Design: poor design is not going to win you return visitors so if you are using wordpress then choose a free professional template. Woo themes have some great free templates.
For me: content, on and off-page seo and then design.

[simbah]

What is more important Content or Design?

First, Content
Second, design.

That's my opinion..

[Phoenyx]

To be completely honest, I would say design first, content afterwards. I guess it does depend on what kind of site you are creating. If you're using a WordPress template, then I would say content and then design, if you are either creating one, or finding a more appropriate template. To me design is more important because its the first thing a person looks at before they even get to the content. If you're selling web design services, this can speak volumes on its own and help a potential client to make a decision based on what they have seen. You can optimize a site perfectly to attract a visitor, but if your design is not user friendly, and darn near impossible to navigate if a visitor wants to look at other content, then they will move on to another site that caters for them. Just my humble opinion

[bencurnow]

This is a really hard one. I agree with Phoenyx as I'm a designer, but I can see why content would be more important.

Design - Attracts Visitors, Visitors look at other content
Content - Visitors have something to read, SEO

I would have to personally say that design is more important, only because I have seen some sites that look really good with barely any content and I have looked through the whole site