I had the pleasure of working with Alice Sundstrom over the past few months to develop and deploy a site for her firm. As principle of Sundstrom Marketing Design, Alice wanted a site which featured her companies commitment to marketing communications for higher education. Sundstrom Marketing Design offers three central services for it’s clients: strategic planning, project management, and design services.

The largest section of the site is the portfolio section which features many pieces of work honored by the Council for Advancement and Support of Education (CASE). Innovative, professional, clean and effective would be words I would use to describe many of the pieces in the portfolio section.

Specializing in marketing communication efforts for institutions of higher education, Sundstrom Marketing Design is very well positioned to help colleges and universities engage students, propects, and potential donors. Alice’s experience at the University of Oregon and her background in fine arts really makes her an excellent resource for many departments and university marketing offices seeking to solidify their brand and meet their marketing goals.

Today, I was browsing some of the fine sites included on the CSS Mania site and came across a design site, in which the owner states that the three “ingredients for a spectacular web site” are: (1) beautiful design, (2) rock solid markup, and (3) attention to the details. While I agree that all of these are important to the design process, I disagree with the author (and the design strategy) and contend that the most important ingredient for a spectacular web site is great content! As a designer, I am constantly running into the challenge of creating pieces that have more effectiveness than simply “looking pretty.” Message, tone, intention, target audience are all affected by the content (as content is often affected by all of these things as well).

No matter how much we, as designers, want to get paid for our skills, if there is no message or content, there really can’t be a website. The web, while evolving, is still a content-driven medium. I’ve recently been reading Kelly Goto and Emily Cotler’s excellent Web Design 2.0: Workflow that Works and it suggests a workflow that actually begins with content generation. While so unintuitive to the designer, I believe that Goto and Cotler are 100% correct in their placement of content at the beginning of the design process. Content mediates all that we do in the design process, and is the starting point, rather than ending point of our work as designers. Content drives traffic, be it on commerce sites or personal blogs. Blogs which don’t say anything (or anything new, as is the unfortunate case of this blog) could be beautifully designed, executed with technical perfection, and focus on every aesthetic detail, yet still end up with no visitors.

What I’ve found lately is that clients, and users, care more about content than they do about XHTML and CSS. I know that personally, I’ve become a web-standards activist with my clients, advocating the necessity for standards compliance (accessibility, portability, browser compatibility, et al). But I’ve also become a content activist with my clients, guiding them through the complexity of finding their voice, describing their product in ways that are meaningful, and developing a message that is focused on what their customers want and need to hear.