Overvaluing good design?

At the risk of committing some sort of journalistic sin, I’m really not sure how much I buy into the idea of the importance of web design. Don’t get me wrong; I understand that it can make the aesthetic value of a site take quantum leaps forward or backward depending on what quality it is, but truthfully, it just doesn’t mean much to me as a web viewer.

As someone who enjoys writing on the Internet and who spends hours every day searching for basketball-related pieces over the ‘Net to link to at my site, I have never once thought about the design of any of the sites I look at on a daily basis, even though there is quite a disparity between some of them when I think back to it now. If I see content that interests me, I read it. If I see content that doesn’t interest me, I’ll save myself the time. Call me naïve, but I still believe that if you can put out great content (which should be our primary focus as journalists), you will earn yourself an audience. If you can’t, you won’t. Undoubtedly, having a well-designed page makes your site more appealing to on-the-fence viewers, but I’m just not sure it is the deal-breaker that we sometimes make it out to be.

All the same, the tips in the “Basic Design Principles for Non-Designers” of the book by Williams and Tollett are indeed all relatively simple and don’t appear to require a major time investment to implement. That being the case, if simply paying a few seconds more attention daily to alignment, proximity repetition and contrast can make a positive difference for my work, I’m happy to do so. I just remain wary of overstating the value of these actions in the minds of our audiences.