How to Format and Share Website Content

Having your content ready to go when we “pull the trigger” is critical to ensuring that we meet your timelines.  Here’s some simple guidelines to help us share information more effectively.

We use cloud-based applications to share content while we are working on your project.  Sending content via e-mails can be challenging – they can get lost, it’s hard to find older emails, you have to open each email to find the content, it just takes longer and is less reliable.  Therefore, all content to go on your website must be shared by some cloud-based storage platform.

If you do not currently use any shared storage, then

• sign-up for and install DROPBOX.  This will give us plenty of space for free that you can start using to organize content.
• Create a folder called COMPANYNAME WEBSITE PROJECT and share it with our dropbox email:  laurenpoussardstudio@gmail.com   Don’t simply call it “website project” – when I get the invitation to share this file I will not be able to tell your project from other client projects – be sure to use your company name.
• Create a folder called COMPANYNAME WEBSITE PROJECT and share that with our regular email lauren@laurenpoussard.com.  Don’t simply call it “website project” – when I get the invitation to share this file I will not be able to tell your project from other client projects – be sure to use your company name.

Once you create the project folder, you need to start organizing your content in a way that is meaningful so that we can easily find things.  We lose valuable time on every project just looking for files.

For content involving WORDS:

• Create a word doc for EACH landing page of your website:   HOME, ABOUT, SERVICES, CONTACT, ETC.
• If your site is to include Products, each product should have it’s own page.
• Each blog post should have it’s own page.
• Each Team member should have his/her own page.
• Testimonials can be incorporated into one document.

IMAGES

Are the hardest for most people to deal with.  Images from your old site might not be usable on the new site, most are of a resolution too low to display nicely on the new site or they are cropped wrong.  We almost never get the original file. They almost always have the original filename assigned by the camera that took it – we lose endless time going through people’s phones trying to decypher images.

Go through all your images and see what is usable.  Find the original image if possible.  Then follow a system similar to the content involving words:

• Need to be descriptively named
• Organized them into sub-folders of like things:  for example, “Images for the home page”, “Product xx Images”, “Team Member Namexxxx”

GRAPHICALLY DESIGNED ELEMENTS

For logos and other graphically designed elements you have and are incoporating into the new site, please contact the designer for the original artwork.  They should also be descriptively named and organized so we can find them.

HELP

If you don’t have images that are useful, need updated headshots for your team, your logo needs to be reworked or new artwork needs to be created, we can do all of this for you in-house as needed.  You will be quoted a price and it will be added on to the final balance.