How to prepare content for a new website

Development is almost never the bottleneck. The bottleneck is copy, photography, and decisions about what to actually say. A project where the design is ready and the content isn't sits for months and costs more than expected.

Where to start

Not with the copy but with a list of pages and what each is for. For every page it helps to answer three questions: who arrives on it, what they should understand, and what they should do next. Without that, the text gets written "about us in general" and doesn't work.

What to prepare

• Service descriptions: what's included, who it's for, how long it takes, how the price is worked out.

• Answers to frequent questions — easiest to gather by writing down what clients actually ask on the phone.

• Case studies: the task, what was done, the result. Even without numbers, describing the task and the solution works better than generalities.

• Company details and contacts in their final form.

• Photography: real, not stock. Stock photos in an "about us" section are spotted instantly and reduce trust.

What form to hand it over in

Text in an editable document, not a PDF and not as images. Photos at maximum quality — the developer handles optimisation. Logo in vector. A separate file or section per page, so nobody has to work out what belongs where.

A useful detail: mark straight away which text is legally required and not open to editing — it can't be trimmed to fit the layout.

If the site is multilingual

The order is: finalise the text in the primary language first, then translate. Translating a draft that will be rewritten is double work. And decide in advance who is responsible for translation: the client, the contractor or an external translator.

Who writes it

Three workable options: the client writes it, because they know the product best; the contractor writes it from interviews; a separate copywriter writes it. The worst option is "we'll come up with the text as we go" — it reliably delays the launch and usually ends with whatever got written first going on the site.

A realistic timeline

Gathering content for a small corporate site takes one to three weeks, provided somebody is working on it deliberately. Plan it alongside development rather than after it.

We usually help assemble the structure and the questions for each page during the analysis stage — so content is prepared in parallel with design instead of blocking the launch.