Is Content King or Should I Make my Site Look Good First?

When starting this site I had a question that I needed to ask myself. Should I focus on writing a ton of content or should I make the site look good first? It's sort of a catch 22 situation.

If I throw up a very basic site and focus just on writing content for awhile then my pages will start to get indexed by the search engines for the content and if someone visits my site they wont see a very pretty site but they will be able to read posts and articles. This could make them not want to come back though. On the other hand, I could sacrifice the content for now for a site that looks good, is well organized, and has a more permanent structure that people visiting can get accustomed to. It might not be a good idea to change the site around on people after they are used to a particular layout.

I ultimately  chose to focus on creating the site layout and tweaking everything exactly the way I want it before writing a bunch of content. Don't get me wrong I am writing about the things I do as I go along but much more of my time is being diverted to website code and layout. I figure if I take this approach as I start to write more content it will pay off in the long run because I will have already done the groundwork for the site and then I can focus on search engine optimization and content production. I am not very knowledgeable in html, css, php, and all the other codes I am having to learn to fine tune the site's appearance the way I want so it definitely helps to do it all in large chunks while it's still fresh in my mind. By large chunks I mean 14 hours + of looking at code for a few days in a row.

Although I think this question can be debated and we all know content is king, I think that laying the groundwork now will give me a very solid foundation to write content on and will prove to be valuable in the coming weeks, months, and years.

Update:

It is now almost 2 months after writing this and  I have an answer to this question that I asked myself. I believe it is better to create the site and make it look good before trying to write a bunch of content. It really doesn't take that long to get a layout going and get everything in place. If you only spend a couple hours a day then it will take you longer. When I first started the site I went about 2 days straight just getting the layout together and making sure everything worked and looked good (and I mean 2 days with long hours each day). I download this template but then customized it to work the way I wanted to. I'm not an expertl web developer and I'm sure most people starting blogs are not either. There is a learning curve and that is why I chose to dive in and spend hours and hours on it because I knew if I kept coming back I would forget how to do certain things. I am happy with the choice I made and I have a good foundation for articles now. Now I can focus on writing.

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