Why You Should Prepare Your Content Before Building Your Website
Introduction
It’s extremely important that you carefully consider and prepare your content prior to starting the web design process. As with so many aspects of life, preparation is the key to success.
Anyone who has tried to follow a recipe while cooking has likely come unstuck by not preparing all the vegetables before starting. That moment where you’re searing some wonderful piece of meat, only to discover that you now need to add the thing that is supposed to be peeled and diced into one-inch pieces. We’ve all been there, and we all want to avoid going there again.
Preparation helps to streamline the entire process.
You can break it into segments, rather than trying to blurt it all out in one go, attempting to keep all the plates spinning at one time. This will also give you the chance to ensure that you have consistency and continuity with all of your content. I can’t stress enough how important this will be to your overall site and brand.
It’s true that we can learn from our mistakes, but how much better to not make them in the first place! I’m hopeful that this can give you some armor to protect you from some of the classic website content errors.
Defining Your Website’s Purpose
First and foremost, you should identify the primary goals of your website. Is it a brochure website, is it an e-commerce site, etc? This will allow you to consider who your audience is by understanding their specific needs. Are you selling a product? Are you selling a service? Is the website's purpose for direct engagement with the audience or a platform to provide information with the ultimate goal of making contact?
be clear on your ultimate goals.
Knowing your ultimate goals will determine the look, feel, structure, and content of your website. The Amazon website has a clear goal to sell products. The BBC News website has a clear goal to provide information. You can easily tell the purpose of each of these sites, without having to spend your precious time looking through them.
Actionable step:
Create a list of the items that define the persona of your ideal client.
Establish your Message and Brand Voice
All of the information on your site should be aligned with your brand. Keeping this consistent across the entire site goes a long way to showing your audience that you are a professional business. Disjointed messages and visuals can be very confusing for your potential customers.
know, like, and trust.
Your website gives you an opportunity to create messaging that aligns with your client and shows your unique value. It proves that you are the right company to help with your visitors' problems. All businesses are there to fix a problem their customer has.
Actionable step:
Write down the core message of your brand that will be used throughout the site.
Outline The Key Website Pages
List the essential pages that most websites have; Home, Services About, Blog, Contact, etc. Use this as a basis for your own site and consider what information is pertinent to each page.
Consider your business messaging, and if there are any areas of what you want to say that are outside of the normal setup. Do you need to add a page of information that is unique to you? A portfolio, for instance.
Actionable step:
Write a brief summary of what each page will contain and its goal.
Create Compelling Page Titles and Headlines
Clear and attention-grabbing headlines serve multiple purposes on your site. They draw your audience in so that they want to know more about your product or service. Creating interest is essential on websites as people will only glance over information unless it’s piqued their curiosity.
Creating interest is essential
Long dull paragraphs of text, no matter how informative, will put a reader off. No one wants to wade through lots and lots of text. Headlines act as a break in text to keep the reader engaged.
Finally, titles serve your site well for SEO (Search Engine Optimization). Google wants structure to web pages, and titles and headlines help your pages perform better in search results.
Actionable step:
Write draft headlines and titles for each page.
Optimize For SEO From The Start
Search Engine Optimisation (SEO) is used to tell search engines about your site and its content in a way they understand. Certain words, called keywords, are used to send searchers to your website. If you have a real estate business, you will want to use words in your copy (text on the site) that reflect what you do. People will be searching with phrases such as:
“Homes for sale in xxxxx”
“Best neighborhoods in xxxxx”
“Family homes with pools”
By understanding the phrases your audience is likely to use, you can use them on your site to increase your chances of being found by search engines.
Actionable step:
Create a list of targeted keywords to use on your pages.
Images, Videos, and Graphics
Visual content helps to tell your story and give emphasis to your message. Not only can this, but this type of content keeps your audience engaged and interested. “A picture can tell a thousand words”, so making considered use of them can save you a lot of time and effort.
“A picture can tell a thousand words”
In order to keep your site moving smoothly and quickly, the way visual content is prepared is important, so preparing your imagery in advance is essential. Poor images will kill even the best website, regardless of the quality of the text.
Actionable step:
Create a list of visual assets you need for each page (product images, team photos, etc).
Clear and Compelling Calls to Action
Calls to Action (CTA’s) are links and buttons that take your audience on a journey around your site. It might be a link to some more information on your site, a buy button, or a button that leads to a contact page. The ultimate goal of your site is to get the reader to want to make a purchase or make contact.
You really should have at least one CTA on each page. Making these personable and interesting can help to keep your brand voice consistent, rather than just a link that says “more”. Examples would be:
“Tell me more”, “Book a Discovery Call”, “Let’s talk”, “I need this”.
Actionable step:
Write a list of draft CTA’s for each of your pages.
Refining and Testing Your Content
It’s extremely important that you carefully refine and test your content prior to starting the design phase. Yes, the design phase is the exciting bit, and everyone is keen to roll their sleeves up and get on with the good stuff. However, having all your content in place will allow you to let your creative juices flow with design work, as you won’t have to keep going backward to gather content.
Your content will help define the design
It’s good to remember that your content will also play a part in defining the design. You want to design around the content, not shoehorn the content into a design. This can lead to compromises in the quality of the information you’re trying to get over to your audience.
Actionable step:
Test your content with colleagues, friends, or people you trust in order to get quality feedback.
Delivering the Content to Your Designer
Choosing a designer to create your website will give you a great many advantages over building a site yourself. Building websites is not as simple as many of the adverts on social media or the internet might suggest. In order to have a high-quality, performing website, there are a number of factors to take into account. The correct platform to allow you to easily add to the site and make future changes. Search engine optimization. Best practices and industry trends. An understanding of layout and design to provide an appealing and interesting aesthetic. The speed of delivery. The list goes on!
A designer can add huge value to your site
Getting the content to your designer is not difficult, but making sure that it’s a simple process for the designer to use is important. Split your content into folders for the intended page rather than having one huge document. Name images according to the page you would like them to appear on. These simple steps alone will speed up the process and reduce the need for back and forward questions.
I ask my clients to use Google Documents for their per-page content and we share a Google Drive folder for the content as it’s extremely easy to set up and use. I also have a number of content planners I share with my clients to give ideas and pointers for the copy required for each page. This helps to remove the “writer's block” fear of starting from a blank page..
Actionable step:
Create subfolders for each page and split your copy and images to correspond with them.
Conclusion
Hopefully, now you understand the importance of carefully preparing the content for your website BEFORE you start on the design. Your content should influence the design of your site and not be made to fit into a design already in place. Researching, writing, and editing content during the design process will slow the process considerably and lead to inevitable compromises.
The information on your site is its most important aspect. This is what your audience is looking for. You need to give them the trust that you are the expert they need for them to contact you or make a purchase. How cool your site looks is a part of the whole picture, but the quality of the content is paramount. Search engines are looking for how good the information is you have on your site. This is how they rank your site against your competition.
Taking the time to research, collate, and prepare the content for your site will give you the foundation to stand out from the crowd. Having trusted people review your information, prior to it being formatted and presented, will not distract them from its relevance.
Starting the process with a plan to carefully prepare your content in advance will allow more design freedom as your site begins to take shape.
