Getting content together for your WordPress site.
Copy is the another important part of any website project, and getting this signed-off before anything else starts is crucial to the success of the project and your site.
No content, no website; we’re a content-first agency for a good reason.
While it can be tempting to start thinking about what your new website will look like, we encourage our clients to focus on what it will say.
Content is the single most important part of any website, but many clients sometimes underestimate its importance.
It’s also surprisingly challenging to write content for your website and can often take a lot longer than first planned, so getting stuck into your content from the get-go leads to a smoother process and a more effective website.
Do you really need to see the design before you write the content?
When we’re asked to design a site so a client can write the content to fit it triggers alarm bells.
A designer’s job is, after all, to present the content in the best way to answer the brief and to connect with the target audience.
The designer’s job is not to dictate word counts or suggest how your content should be structured. That’s putting the proverbial cart before the horse.
Instead, we expect our clients to be able to write fluently about their organisation and the services it provides – it is your organisation, not ours, and if you don’t know what to write, it’s a bit of a red flag (maybe time for a career change?).
Jokes aside, you need to write the content before any agency worth its salt will work on the creative.
Supplying the content for your new site in a way the creative team can use it.
We prefer all content documents to be shared in Google Drive or similar. Ideally you want one copy of the document in one place, not 10 different versions pinging about on email.
We ask all clients to create shared Google Docs, with one document per page and clear formatting for titles, cross-heads, etc.
If you want an image in there, link to the source rather than uploading it.
Being organised with your content speeds up the project and means that we can see what you want the page to do and how you want it to work – as mentioned above, this informs the design stages and results in a better site.
Struggling with the content for your new WordPress site?
If your site content will be a sticking point for your new website, you are not alone.
It can often be the case that there is simply no copywriting capacity in-house or that the organisation hasn’t really got around to putting everything they do on paper—it does happen as smaller organisations are more agile, and things can change quite often.
If your organisation also has many internal stakeholders who need to sign off on everything, this can take a long time.
If you need help, we can help you plan and write the content for your website; we have two in-house copywriters who write for a diverse range of websites.
Whether you need everything written for you or simply some SEO editing, we can incorporate it into the project. But remember, we won’t be doing anything else until this gets signed off.
