Outside of the text, nothing else conveys any message. As I have said time and time again, content is king. I did broadcast programming for radio stations before getting into teaching, and I always believed that if a radio station got the music mix correct, they could do just about everything else wrong and still be successful. It's the same with Web pages. If the content is something that people really want, then just about every design concern can go out the window.
Content is that important.
However, the content can be helped tremendously if what surrounds it is taken into consideration. Everything on the home page should convey a meaning to the viewer. I knew the site was about bowling before going in because of the author's letter submitting the site to be critiqued. Yes, the text reads bowling, but other than that, nothing else says bowling. We are visual creatures, we humans.