Ask most people what slows a website build down and it's likely they'll guess technical problems, design revisions or maybe scheduling issues. Yet, much like the Wonderful Wizard of Oz, the truth is far less glamorous: content.
By content, we are not just talking about the information that appears on your site (imagery and photography, copy, product and/or service information) or, indeed, where all that information is coming from (are you providing it yourself or are you hiring a copywriter, for example) - but the basic brand foundations that we need to work from, such as who you are trying to reach, why you are trying to reach them, what your tone of voice is and what your USP's are.
Not clarifying these points before starting a website only means having to address them during the build. This causes inevitable delays and bottlenecks as content is passed back and forth, images are altered and text is re-written. Sometimes there may not be enough information for the build to even begin.
Contents
- Why lack of content planning catches people out so often
- The best websites are designed to fit the content, not the other way around
- Collating product and service information is a job of it's own
- Consider where copywriting fits in
- Delays rarely have a single cause, there are usually several small ones
- How to help protect your website build from delays
Why lack of content planning catches people out so often
When you picture your website, it is right that you picture the end result: glossy pages, reams of information, CTA buttons, beautiful imagery. As such, it's easy to imagine that the content develops as part of the design process, however the truth is quite the opposite.
Content planning is a significant undertaking and there can often be more than one person who is involved in collating and producing it. You might be happy to create all the content and imagery yourself, or perhaps you will hire a copywriter, photographer or a videographer. At the very least, having a clear vision of what you need and where you need it on your site before you speak to your website designer is imperative to ensuring the build is completed on time.
Here are some of the reasons why:
The best websites are designed to fit the content, not the other way around
A designer using stock photography or placeholder text is essentially designing a site using guesswork. Real copy has real length, expression and structure. Real photography has real shape, tone and style. These factors fundamentally change how a page should be laid out.
A page built around a short paragraph falls down the moment the real copy turns out to be three times the length, just as a hero image built around a wide bright photograph no longer works with the dark, narrow one supplied at the end. Working with the final content, as far as is possible, is the only way to ensure your design works best for the information it holds.
Collating product and service information is a job of it's own
Gathering accurate, consistent and up to date information for every product and service your business offers is as significant a task as it sounds. Yet, not doing so can create huge delays in the design process.
This means ensuring that pricing structures, product variants and descriptions (including shipping dimensions or postal preferences) are all accurate and as much photography for each product is available as early into the website build as possible. It's easy to underestimate how long this takes because it doesn't feel like 'building a website' - but overlooking this task will inevitably delay the launch of your website.
Consider where copywriting fits in
A good number of the clients we work with don't realise they need help with copy until a build has already started to stall around it. This isn't because they can't write, but because writing web copy that's crafted to read online, and built for what search engines - and now AI - need to make sense of, is a different skill to writing the way you'd talk to a customer in person. Copywriting is something we offer alongside a build for exactly that reason, and it tends to come up naturally once it's clear that it is the content that is holding things up.
Delays rarely have a single cause, there are usually several small ones
The delay is almost never 'we have no content at all'. More often it's a scattering of smaller gaps across different pages. A team photo that's three years out of date. Two service descriptions that exist only as an email sent to a customer once. A testimonial someone remembers getting verbally but never wrote down. None of these feel like a big issue to resolve individually, but when these small missing pieces stack up, the larger puzzle remains unfinished.
How to help protect your website build from delays
None of this means content has to be perfect, or even finished, before a project starts. It just means ensuring that you have put enough time into considering and preparing as much content as you can before the build begins.
Knowing roughly what content you'll need, and being honest early on about how much of it already exists in comparison to how much still needs creating, is one of the simplest things a business can do to keep a project on the timeline it started with. It's also exactly the kind of thing worth working through before having that first conversation about a new site, rather than discovering it three weeks into the build.
