You’ve decided to have your web site professionally designed and developed. Good decision! Now what?

You might already be thinking about the look of your web site or thinking about some cool bells-and-whistles that would be fun to have on your web site. Stop now.

First things first – you need to determine what content will be on your web site and how you want to organize it.

Designing a web site before you know what content you will be putting on the web site is like putting the cart before the horse, and you all know how that will work out.

A web site with fancy graphics (for the sake of fancy graphics) with content crammed into the site in an unplanned fashion is not going to appeal to many visitors. People will be visiting your web site because they want to learn something about your business or services. Start your web site project by planning out the information structure of your site and the design will fall into place afterward.

Why is it so important to focus on content and information structure before design and development of a web site? Because the content is the backbone and lifeblood of your web site.

Starting out a web project by gathering and organizing content first will provide the following benefits:

  • Your designer/developer will know exactly what the scope of the site is and what message you are trying to convey, which will make the design process more smooth
  • Your designer/developer will have clear direction when mapping out the pages of the site and will be able to create better relationships between the pages and content throughout the site if they have the content sitting in front of them beforehand
  • You’ll save money on design/development because your project will have a clear direction. In other words, you won’t be throwing content at the designers/developers late into the project and saying “We need to fit this in there somewhere”. You won’t need any revisions to site layouts and content, which can easily cause a project to go over the initial budget.

“Sounds great,” you might say. “So how do I go about organizing the content and information on my web site before I hand it over to a designer?”

Easy.

Follow these steps below before you talk to a web designer and you’ll experience a smooth web site development process.

Brainstorm

Write a brainstorm list of all the content you’d like to have on the site. Don’t leave anything off the list. Make sure to include every bit of content that you want to have on the site. Here’s an example of a quick brainstorm list for a web site:

  1. Company history
  2. Staff bios
  3. Our phone number
  4. Our email address
  5. List of our 5 products
  6. Photos of our products
  7. Pictures of people using our products
  8. Places to buy our products

Organize

Once you have your list of content written down, organize the items into desired page structure. For example:

  1. About Us page – Company history and staff bios
  2. Contact Us page – phone number and email address
  3. Products page – list of our 5 products with info about them and photo of each, and some pictures of people using our products

Write

Now you have your page structure. For each page, write the content that will be on the page. Write out your full company history, write the bios for you staff members and write the descriptions for the products on your products page. This is your first draft of the content for your web site.

Revise & Proofread

Now that you have a first draft of your content, proof read it all again and finalize it. You want to provide your designer with final, complete page copy.

Note: Make sure that you will not be doing any more revisions to your content before you hand it over to your designer to start the design process. Each time you revise content that has already been provided to your designer, you run the risk of driving your project budget out of control. Designers expect that you are going to be providing final page copy to them, and they estimate their time accordingly. Revisions on page copy after you deliver it to your designer will ruin your budget and estimates.

Compile

Put all your page content into text documents, keep it all digital. It’s much easier for your designer to get copy from a Word file rather than having to re-type copy that is on a printed piece of paper.

Keeping all your page copy in an easily accessible digital format will keep design time efficient. Burn your pictures onto a cd, or make a list of needed pictures if you don’t have them. This way the designer will know what images they need to find for you.

Deliver

Hand your designer the final page copy and the photos you have. Your designer will do a quick review of the content and photos and will know exactly how you would like to have your web site organized.

Watch the Magic Begin

After handing all your page copy and images to the designer, let them review and make suggestions. Remember, they do this stuff for a living and might have a few ideas on how to better organize your content. This will add the extra polish on the organization of your web site. You wouldn’t get this benefit if you didn’t hand them anything to start with!
The designer will be able to get to work right away and have clear direction on how to approach the project. This will save you time and money.

If you are intimidated by the process of compiling and writing content, approach your designers/developers to help you out with this process before having them design anything. Even if you need professional assistance in the content writing and organization phase, it will still pay dividends during the design and development process. Don’t put the cart before the horse, bad things can happen.

Everybody wins when you have content written and organized before beginning design on a new web site!