What does your website need?
Every website is different and will have a different purpose or function. Most websites are used as a point of contact for businesses, so they can be easily found and contacted via email or phone. Many borchure sites have a high bounce rate as customers will get the business phone number straight from the website header and then leave.
The problem…
So what do you need on your site, exactly? Many clients approach us knowing they need a website, and knowing what sort of pages they intend to add to it – but the content for the pages is a sticking point.
We’ll often create the website design and develop it as a working theme on WordPress, with all of the pages in place, but the project can become stuck for serveral weeks while the client works on the text content for the site.
Another issue is photography. A site can be stuck with stock photography for some time before decent photography is sourced.
Where to begin
Our aim is to create more solid advice and guidance for our clients to follow during the web design process. To give more input on what content should appear on the site, rather than dropping in large blocks of Lorem Ipsum (dummy text). Staring at large sections of “add your text here!” can be overwhelming, and make it easy for us to say “I’ll get to it later”.
We have considered advising that clients create their content before we agree to the project. That way they can take as long as they like creating the content for pages, then when they engage with us, we know the design and development process will only take a week or two. Unfortunately we’ve found this often means client’s take even longer to create the content as their is no urgency or pressure from us to get things done.
And the solution?
The first bit of advice is to first write up your site map. What pages exactly do you want on your site? For example: Home, About Us, Services, Shop, Testimonials, Blog, Contact.
Then write up the content for the About Us page. If you can, go into as much detail as possible, try to fill up 1 side of A4 on MS Word. This will give us content which we can potentially use on the rest of the site (such as the home and contact pages).
If you are having a shop, create a list of the products you intend to sell with titles, descriptions and prices, and photos where possible.
It would be ideal for you to be at this point before you contact any web design agencies asking for a quote, as it’s likely they’ll need at least a sitemap before being able to get an accurate estimate.
I will explain the sort of content to include in your About page on the next blog post.