Content. Content. Content. I need your content.

26 Jul Content. Content. Content. I need your content.

It may seem obvious, but for some reason, it’s the most overlooked item when planning a new website.

CONTENT

Content is literally everything that is going to be displayed on your website, broadly speaking, it’s the images and words that make up the pages. While I am pretty good at figuring things out, I can’t really conjure up the words and imagery that will best describe your business.  Only you can do that, and I will definitely lend a hand.

Here’s some things to think about for our first website project meeting, and the things I will need before I can give you a great first revision of your new website:

What to prepare regarding CONTENT for our new website meeting:

• What is your current website doing/not doing for you?  What’s its purpose?
• What’s your client’s Call to Action?  Is it to buy something? schedule a meeting/consultation/book?
• What is your message?  We go to many meetings where it seems like that isn’t always clear to people – sometimes we are just too close to our business to really express it correctly to a third party.  Think about who your audience is, what will attract or impress them, how do you solve their problem, why are you different?  If you need help with this, at least write down some thoughts we can explore at our meeting.
• Are we going to use words from your existing website?  Have you read it lately?  Does it need to be refreshed or updated?  I recommend you revisit your existing site, see what we can repurpose, and begin the process of cleaning, refining or rewriting the words.  Print out each page of your website and write your revisions on it, or, create a word document for each page with new copy.  We can share these files via dropbox.
• By WORDS I mean everything on the site: page titles, the actual copy, testimonials, clever taglines or marketing queues/prompts, project descriptions, blog posts… every. word. on. the. site.
• Are we reusing images from the old site? What resolution are they?  Do you have the original files if we need to resize them? Do you have new images?  Think about the imagery that should go along with all of these great new copy you are writing.  LABEL all of your images so that I know what I am looking at so I can use the images correctly.
• Are you going to be featuring portfolio items or projects?  Many of my clients use their website as a way to showcase their work.  If that’s the case, you need to go through your images and find the highest quality images you have of each portfolio/project item to serve as the “featured image” that attracts attention.  Are we going to have a gallery of images for each portfolio item?  Were any of them taken with a smartphone? (gasp!)  Be sure you have high quality images of your work and LABEL everything so I understand where to place them.
• Have you ever gathered testimonials from clients?  Think about asking some of your favorite clients for a testimonial, or even a video testimonial.  Happy customers are always glad to give them, you can always treat them to a discount, gift certificate or dinner as a thank you.
• Headshots and team photos – are they up to date, do you need new ones?
• Product photography – if you are selling anything, we need crisp, clear product photography!
• Do you plan on blogging?  Blogging is a great way to get a little seo for your website – you found me, didn’t you?  Well, that’s why I blog! If you have never blogged, think about topics so we can start creating categories and content ideas and strategies.
• How are people going to search for you online?  Think in terms of how your customers see you so that you can target your content to them,

There are so many other things we also need to prepare for a new website, but we’ll save those for another post!

Without these things, we really can’t make much progress, we we like to launch sites when you need them!  So, focus on preparing content and we can get to work.

As always, please reach out if we can assist in any way.