When you order a website or an online store in an agency, there is a temptation to leave the creation of the content at the end, when at least the design, and ideally the whole product, is ready.
This approach is risky. The main one is to get a beautiful but useless web product for attracting customers and sales.
Why does the contractor request content right away
Contents
At the design and development stage of an MVP, the task of specialists is to design the appearance of a future site or service, taking into account the location of all functional elements such as buttons, forms, text blocks, images, as well as their hierarchy.
It turns out that the content will be needed even before the design stage. Be it an online store, web service, corporate, or promotional website. If you use a website design template, it will be easier to visualize the required amount of content.
Why is it inconvenient to do content in advance
From experience, we noticed three difficulties that customers face in preparing content:
- It is not clear what content is needed.
- Now all employees are busy with other projects, and there is no time for content.
- The customer company does not have a specialist who can do this.
Consider what to do in each of these cases.
1. It is not clear how much and what materials need to be prepared.
When you decide to develop a new corporate website, online store, or web service, at the start, it is usually not clear how much and what materials will be needed. From here, the request appears: “Let us first make a website, and then we will see how to fill it.”
The solution is to do analytics
- You can understand how much and what content you need much earlier than the site will be fully developed. For this, the analytics stage is carried out, after which it becomes clear:
- what information do users need to give for the finished web product to work for the business;
- what sections are required on the site;
- what content is necessary for each page?
2. No time to prepare content
There is much information to collect and structure. It takes time. And the person responsible for this was planning to do the work when the site is ready. Now there is simply no time to do this.
The solution is to prioritize content
If the question is about the time of employees, then it is worth putting this work in priority. After all, the result that will turn out directly depends on the availability of content.
- In a situation where it is impossible to provide all the content for the site at once, we suggest doing so:
- After the stage of analytics, we make a list of all the materials and media that are needed to fill the site.
- We determine which pages and documents will be unique in structure and type of content, and which ones will be the template.
For example, the main page of the site and the section about the company are unique. The model is suitable for service pages, blog articles, product cards in the online store.
We collect content first for individual pages. And for template pages, we prescribe the required blocks and design their hierarchy without ready-made materials.
By the beginning of the design phase, the content was ready for all sections except the portfolio. The portfolio was more difficult. There are many projects. It is not clear for what there are all the necessary images and descriptions, and for which – you need to create something additionally. In this situation, at the design stage, we laid several design options: for flagship projects and standard ones.
On flagship projects, all the necessary content was “at hand.” Hence, the designers were able to start working on these pages quickly.
And the structure of standard pages was designed so that the customer did not have to “invent” anything in terms of content. In essence, it provides a description of the game and images from the game world, which the studio has.
3. No competencies
It happens that the customer’s team does not have a person who can prepare a text for the site or organize the shooting of goods, employees, workrooms.
It seems that when the site is ready, it will be easier to assess the scale of work. And it will be easier to find performers and clearly describe the task for them.
According to our observations, such sites remain unfilled for a very long time after launch. Indeed, the development of content will take time.
Solution: immediately transfer content preparation to the contractor
If in any case, you plan to attract third-party performers, why not do it right away at the start.
Ideally, if the content will be developed by the same website design agency. Then the site will be designed in a single style and subordinated to a single task, which was determined at the stage of analytics.
If you collect photos of employees, they will turn out to be of different quality, style, with varying balances of color. With such images, the site will look untidy. And the untidiness on the image site of the hospital does not work well on this image and can alienate patients.
Therefore, before the start of the design, we held a photo session of employees and took photos in the same style, with the same light and color correction.
When ordering content from the customer:
- Give examples of the desired tonality of materials and essential points that you need to write about in each section of the site.
- Transfer information about the company that already exists: on the old site, in social networks, publications, advertising materials.
- For our part, organize employees for the shooting: inform them of the appointed day and time, so that they are ready and prepared.
- If necessary, give contacts or arrange a meeting with employees who can tell more about the work of the company, its products, services, or areas of activity.
How to prepare the desired content: step-by-step instructions
Summarize all the stages of creating content:
- Analyze what tasks the company needs to solve through the site, what users want, how competitors solve these problems.
- Determine the overall structure of the website: what sections are required, what function each section performs.
- Describe for each chapter what will be described in the text and what images will be needed.
- Determine which of the branches are unique in content structure, and which can be reduced to a template. Rank individual pages by importance.
- For template pages, define the structure: what information will be exactly on this page.
- Prepare content for unique pages.
These stages are suitable for the situation when you decide to prepare materials for the future web product entirely independently, or you coordinate the work of a freelance copywriter.
If you submit the development of content to the agency, then your participation will be needed only to correlate the results of each stage.