What is the number one cause of web site failure? Stale content — by far. No other factor even comes close.

You hear people complain about “hard to use content management system”, “bad graphics”, “excessive downtime from host”, etc. These are all factors, and in some rare cases can kill a site, but almost always the real killer of a web site is bad content, stale content, or no content.

Fancy graphics are nice, if they are wrapped around good content. Reliable hosting is a real plus, but only if people are coming to your site in the first place. An easy to use content management system makes life easier – if you’re updating content. Otherwise it’s just an excuse for not posting new material.

Look at some of the most high traffic sites on the internet: Google, Facebook Youtube, etc. Which one has the best graphic design?

Google doesn’t have ANY graphic design. Text over a white background. Any good graphic artist will tell you that’s the kiss of death on a web site. You need flash animations, video teaser and fancy AJAX to get visitors to your site. Obviously Google doesn’t know anything about running a successful web site. Yeah, right.

What about Facebook? Still a pretty lame design. IBM blue, gray shading, ruling lines, busy layout. Any Design 101 student will tell you that site is a disaster. Nobody young and hip would ever use that site.

Youtube does a little better. But we’re still taking about a lot of plain text on white backgrounds and default blue links. You’d think a site that specializes in video would be more hip.

So why are these sites successful? Content. People use Google, Facebook, and Youtube for the content, not to be impressed with the web experience.

I’m not against good design. We have a full time graphic designer on staff. A good design does enhance the web experience, but it can’t make up for bad content, stale content or no content. If your organization will spend half as much effort on the content plan as you do on the graphic design, I can almost guarantee significantly improved results from your site.