Is it important to have loads of information on every page? I hear content is king.
Quality content is king! BUT, you must make certain that your content is relevant to your topic. Also, the content must be unique and worth reading.
The one thing people seem to forget is how important keeping a site simple is. Simplicity is key in keeping your visitor. The more you throw at them, the less they are inclined to follow your conversion path. Visitors rarely fully read through anything. With the barrage of information thrown at us everyday, our society has learned to pick at the strong points and find what they want fast, or leave. You need to state very clearly what it is you can offer them, then lead them to exactly what they want. This comes from knowing your visitor, knowing your subject, and knowing how to convert. Content is also king because if you write it well enough, it's the best way to build up backlinks. Webmasters are always linking to people that have good content. If you have it, what's to stop them from linking to you?
If your friend has good links to his site, it'll contend. My reasoning behind having more text than code is to keep the spiders from spending more time on your code than the text. Also, lightening the load for download. If you have more text than code, you likely will also show up for more longtail searches.
This is another reason why I love CSS over tables. No tests. Just deductive analysis from research on my own sites. Again, I believe code to text ratio is a factor for the reasons stated above, but not THE factor.
Did you test your theory on text / code ratio?
One of my friends is running a site developed by Frontpage with a lot of redundant code and that site has a very good position in SERPS.
regards,
d4e5