With a serious snowstorm bringing the Northeast to a standstill at the end of 2010, brick and mortar stores were sure to suffer losses as consumers hunkered down in their homes.
While this is bad news for businesses that depend on walk in traffic, many believe that online retailers see a considerable increase in sales during very bad weather. Although it is still unclear whether or not the Snowmageddon of 2010 has brought a substantial increase in revenue to eCommerce businesses, data shows that last Christmas season during an east coast snowstorm online retailers saw a 13 percent boost in sales.
Snow or no snow, the 2010 holiday season has been a major cyber success. According to MasterCard’s SpendingPulse eCommerce Index, sales online rose a healthy 15.4 percent from last year to $36.4 billion.
In the previous blog post Sergey touched a subject of balance between a content and design. That post actually originated from an email thread between him and myself, as we were arguing going over why we should concentrate more on content as oppose to presentation. His point I guess is pretty clear, so this time around I want to offer my perspective on this thing.
I think content is king, even more it’s an emperor, an all-mighty-frigging-dictator if you wish. If you have what people want, really really want – they won’t care whether it comes in a nicely presented way or in plain black-on-white as long as you can read one way or another. Actually I believe it’s quite easy to prove. Let’s see, if you’re reading this you are either:
- work here, so your boss(me) told ya to go read my awesome creative masterpiece
- you ended up on this blog post through some random link from some random site or twitter or reddit or technorati, or another one of the gazzilion aggregation websites out there
- you came here through Google or Yahoo or Bing, or, god forbid, AOL
Regardless of your origin you landed on this page safely, without going through our nice and shiny navigation, or digging through list of articles(which currently consists of exactly 2 items). Why? Because someone else created link directly to this bit of content(be that someone a human or crawler bot).
In other words:
- content is what gets you visitors
- content is what gets you links
- content is what people are interested in
This actually poses an interesting problem for websites that are not content heavy. I mean blogs are simple, as Sergey said – setup WordPress, find nice theme, and you’ll be all set, till you earn your million dollars through AdSense or whatever. But let’s look at “serious websites”. Say online stores. Well there we have things like usability coming into play, so design does play an important role in it, but what happens in a lot cases – people set it as a most important thing and invest a lot into it, while starving content, forgetting that it’s still a king. And starved kings don’t look too good. What end’s up happening is that budget is spent on building a beautiful frame, leaving zero or very few dollars for actual painting. In the end though – it’s content that matters and that brings you customers and makes them buy(granted, site needs to function well). Be that content a set of nicely done product photos, attractive description or some other creative way of product presentation.
Design is important, sure, but I believe content comes first, as it is the essence and a base of communication. And if content is a king, communication is a god(or a demi-god at the very least), since I guess that’s what the web is all about.
