When you visit a website, your attention is drawn towards how information is presented to you more-so than what information is actually on the page. Take for example researching for a paper. Are you going to trust a site written in Comic Sans? While it may have perfectly good information, the fact is that good design conveys professionalism and knowledge in any given subject. This is why having a good design is so important.

Now, good design may also be misleading. A site may be very well designed, but have little valuable content. This is why it's immensely important to keep a good balance present.

Here are some of my tips on how to maintain a good design that focuses on your content:

Don't add elements that detract from the content. As obvious as this should be, sometimes people feel the need to add in elements that are completely useless to their overall design. For the longest time, the Adobe website had a floating animated button in the bottom right-hand corner of the screen for submitting feedback. Users shouldn't have to submit feedback on a site of the people who designed it were competent in what they were hired to do.

Organize your information. Users love being able to find what they're looking for very quickly. When you maintain a hierarchy of information on every page of your site, it's very easy to locate information quickly. Headings and lists act as great elements to help organize your information.

Use easy-to-read typography. The newspaper industry has virtually perfected typography. Use them as an example as to how you should layout your own text. I'm not suggesting you write your entire website in columns and use Times New Roman, but in terms of kerning and font size they are a prime example. Leading is the spacing between two lines. In CSS, this is interpreted by the line-height attribute. Having space between your lines of text makes content more easily readable, making your content more appealing to your users.

As you can see, I am by no means saying content is not important. Content is the most important part of a website. However, what gets users is how the content is immediately presented to them. No one is going to believe you if you publish a scientific discovery in Comic Sans, and likewise, no one is going to trust your website if it looks like it was designed in 1996.