If you were stranded on a desert island and a message in a bottle washed up on the beach, what would you do?

Would you look in fascination at the bottle, drawn-in by its shape, the way light reflects through the glass, the emblem on the side?

Or would you break the bottle open to discover the meaning of the message inside?

Obviously you’d want to get to the message.  It’s what matters.  The bottle is just a vessel.  It’s a commodity of no particular value by itself.

Now consider this:  your business website template is a bottle.

Yet in most website design projects today, it’s still commonplace to focus almost entirely on the design of the website (the vessel), and only consider the message that must be communicated after the design is completed.

By then, you have to cram the message into the bottle as an afterthought, without any design considerations for how that vessel displays the important components of the message.

This is a vestige of website design projects of the last few decades.  It used to be a given that a website design project was about the “design”, meaning the aesthetic appearance of the site.  Images, colors, layouts, banners, navigation, calls to action – all were designed before developing the message.

Essentially, this is what people thought design was.  How it looked.  But leaders like Steve Jobs taught us that “design is how it works.”  This is especially true with lead-generation website designs.  It’s not the the bottle, but the message inside that makes it work.

The reality today is that “cool” website designs are almost as much of a commodity as a glass bottle.  With modern templates and CMS systems, it’s not difficult, time consuming, or expensive to design a professional looking website.  You have no real competitive advantage with design aesthetics.

Instead, it’s what you have to say that counts.  Your value proposition, which states how you’ll solve your customers problem, details the specific value you offer, and clarifies what distinguishes you from the competition, must be central.

Your call to action, where you persuade visitor to take the action you desire, is critical to your conversion success.  If this merely looks good, your conversion rates will be disappointing.

How your website works – the message – is built around words.  Just like the message in the bottle, it’s the words that communicate from one person to another.

However, a website is far more complex than a bottle.  This is why you need to know what your message is going to be before you design the vessel.

In other words, the website design is built to serve the message, not the other way around.  The way you use images, headers, encapsulated content, your navigation – all this is part of the message your design should support.

Too many small business owners are still getting this concept backwards.  Then they wonder why, after their entire design is done, it doesn’t provide a useful experience for their visitors.

The reason is that nobody cares about the bottle.  It should look professional, but otherwise it’s of passing interest.  It’s the message inside they are eager to understand.

Often, the reason that businesses don’t develop their websites around a vital message is because that content is challenging to create.  It is, in fact, much harder to come up with effective value propositions and calls to action than it is to make a webpage look good.

But do that hard work first and you’ll be way ahead in having a website that converts leads and sales for your business.

Your client is that person, stranded on the island.  They have a problem they want you to solve.

Tell them how you will solve it.

Your website design won’t win you a single client.  The message it conveys, on the other hand, creates the connection that is the very essence of online commerce.