Get help preparing your website materials. From basic text through images and meta tag writing, Ceed will help you gather the materials you need to create an outstanding, well-positioned website.
This step of the website design and development process proves to be the most time consuming. To ensure a quick project timeline, considering working with Ceed during this phase of the project, ideally in partnership with a member from the client’s team who will act as subject matter expert.
Tips on Getting Your Website Materials Together
Gathering content for your new website may seem like a pretty intuitive process, and it can be. You probably already have plenty of content that can be worked into your new website – and this is especially true if your business is already established. What tends to slow people down is that it can be very time consuming, and some people become susceptible to writer’s block. So – here is a ‘to do’ list to help you get through the process of getting all of your materials ready to hand off to Ceed if you decide to handle this part of the process yourself or in-house.
First, let’s define ‘content.’ The term is shorthand when referring to all of the text, images, graphics, ads, or any other materials that appear on your Web site.
Step 1: Audit your existing marketing materials
Collect and review available content, including:
- Existing website copy and images (especially if this is a redesign project)
- Existing marketing materials
- Any other materials that you have on hand that describe your products, services, business, or that relate to the purpose of your site, such as a business plan or internal planning materials.
Leveraging these existing materials to help save on cost by using this material to quickly fill in the blanks on your website content online.
Step 2: Outline your proposed website – new or redesigned
Here is a technique that should help you get started. Open your word processing tool. At the top of the first page, head it with ‘0.0 Home,’ hit return and start to write your introductory copy – title and text. (If starting with ‘0.0’ is confusing, just start with 1.0 instead. The zero is used to denote the starting point of entry from your main URL in your site map – see below).
As soon as your initial writing outburst subsides, go ahead and insert a ‘page break,’ and head the next page ‘1.0 Services’ or whatever makes sense for your website.
If you have ‘sub-pages’ you can then order them 1.1, 1.2, 1.3, etc.
Then start with your next major section, and again, if necessary assign sub-page numbers.
Here is an example from a small services company website:
0.0 Home
1.0 Service 1
2.0 Service 2
3.0 About Us
4.0 Contact Us
——> 4.1 Thank You
Or perhaps:
0.0 Home
1.0 About
2.0 Services
——> 2.1 Counseling
——> 2.2 Coaching
3.0 Approach
4.0 About
5.0 Contact Us
——> 5.1 Thank You
Here is a more complicated partial example from an e-commerce type website:
2.0 Products
2.1 Product type one
——> 2.1.1 Description
——> 2.1.2 Specifications
——> 2.1.3 Warranty
2.2 Product type two
——> 2.2.1 Description
——> 2.2.2 Specifications
——> 2.2.3 Warranty
…
Or perhaps:
2.0 Products
bq. 2.1 Product category one
——> 2.1.1 Product A
—> —> 2.1.1.1 Description
—> —> 2.1.1.2 Specifications
—> —> 2.1.1.3 Warranty
….
Your outline should be determined based on your specific needed content, in line with your particular products or services. Plus as your working on your outline, consider the standard industry and customer service content that constitutes best practices in your online category through an assessment of your top competitors’ websites.
There are exceptions, but aim to create roughly one full page of content per page, especially if you want a chance to perform well in the search engines. Ideally, create each page with a specific keyword theme in mind.
Coping with Writer’s Block
Writer’s Block is definitely a frequent cause of delayed website launch. If you find down the line, or a few weeks out, that you still haven’t gotten the whole outline filled in, don’t be afraid to downsize your outline – for now. You can always revisit and add more to your website later and ideally that will be possible on an ongoing, if intermittent, basis. For any critical items that are generally holding things up unnecessarily in the present, create a broader, ‘phased’ timeline so your team has the heads up on future needs and your current site can be built with your particular ‘scale-ability’ needs in mind, meaning you should be able to add content later without necessitating a redesign and ideally you can add that content yourself (if you like) through a web-based content editor.
Within your major outline, you can simply indicate that some items are planned for Phase II, Phase III, etc.
Step 3. Document the navigation.
What is the site’s navigation? It is the persistent toolbar(s) or category or section lists that keep site users oriented to their location within a website.
Regarding best practices in navigation, readers will tire when have to consistently sift through more than six or seven options, so go to a ‘sub-navigation’ set-up if necessary, where there is a submenu of navigation choices once entering into a specific category on your site.
There are several types of research that can be conducted to ensure the Navigation is audience-friendly, such as Keyword Research, Competitive Auditing and/or Competitive Benchmarking research, as well as focus group research. You can also consider using a Web tool, like SurveyMonkey, which will let you quickly get feedback from a group of people that you survey.
Preliminary research can also extend to critical pages of the site using simple preliminary ‘wire frames’ prior to getting into extensive Web design or development. At any rate, it is a great idea to keep testing your site throughout the development process, but that is a topic that warrants it’s own article unto itself.
This is not really step three per se, but happens concurrently with the other areas of preparation. As you are looking at the materials for your website, you may start to formulate an idea of what you want on your main navigation bar. It is a good idea to back up your choices with quantitative and qualitative keyword research.
Step 4. Physically and/or digitally gather all relevant graphics, photos, and images.
Website Graphical Preferences
In terms of your brand presence, you will want to integrate your existing logo and other elements of your identity, such as your tag line, preferred fonts, colors, and so forth. You will be specifically asked to share this type of information at the outset of a website design project. It will also be helpful to provide hard copies of any previously designed marketing materials to ensure brand continuity across your marketing channels.Depending on the Client’s situation, at times Ceed will also design a logo for the Client, especially in cases of new businesses, since this tends to easily flow from the Web design process as the site is viewed from an audience branding perspective.
Page-specific Graphics, Photos, and Special Effects
In terms of ‘page-based’ images, please indicate the locations for page-specific graphics and images within the Web site outline created using the method discussed above.Step 5. Check to ensure that your content may legally appear on your Web site.
If you have a question about the legality of your content, check into it up front. The client is responsible for ensuring the legality of content to be used in the construction of the new site and may want to have materials reviewed by their lawyer.
Wrapping it Up
So essentially that’s it. You will want to have a Web site outline ready to go, filled in with your fully proofed text and images, and you will want to have your navigation labels ready to go especially if your site is complicated.
If Ceed is handling content organization as part of the website development process, you may submit your materials in any form that you have them and they will be organized into an outline for you to edit and proof, including recommended navigation labels.
If you cannot provide your text and images via a digital method, sending print outs with notation via fax also tends to be very efficient, especially in light redesign scenarios, provided the actual page content is located on the Web where it can be picked up or copied.