Deuce – Brilliant quote. Is it yours?

Walter – Another great point. If you’re publishing straight-up content, a turnkey site could be fine, but what if you want to put out an eBook? Or as you said, tinker slightly with placement, etc.

Scopy – It’s true that first impressions go a long way. And we all have too short of an attention span these days to lose customers because they’re turned off by a stodgy looking site.

This being said, content is king but it’s a shame it not always that simple when you are in business.

On the other hand, if you are trying to be proactive with your business needs and convert visitors into buyers, or subscribers, then you need to be effective. This often means being able to make small changes to the site to test it. A perfect example is a site I did for my wife – to help promote her photography business. By changing a couple of elements on a page, she increased her conversion rate (people who called inquiring about services / number of visitors to the site) by over 400%.

Many free templates don’t easily allow you to make those simple changes, so either you, or someone else, has to know how to properly work on a site to make it be more effective.

Power point presentations…no “point”, no “power”.

“Any decent monarchy has a pecking order. If content is king, then design is queen, code is the shield-bearer, and promotion is the jester. One of the classic mistakes that webmasters make is to place the role of jester before king. Promoting an unfinished website makes a webmaster look foolish before his peers”