There are many different aspects to corporate website design and development, but the one stumbling block for most website owners is providing the content for their website. This is the one step that holds up 99% of all websites, usually because the business owner is too busy to write their own content, but more often than not, they don’t have any idea where to start!
When we design websites, we actually use the content to guide our design decisions. So for example, if our clients have provided a number of bullet points about their key products and services, we may take these bullet points and convert them into graphical icons or other elements on the page.
The content of your website is a vital element of your corporate website design, so here are a few tips on putting it all together for your developer.
Tips on preparing content for your developer
To make sure that your corporate website design is completed on budget and on time, as well as giving you the best chance to convert visitors into paying customers, you need to seriously consider its content. This content needs to be well-written and well planned and provided in a clear format to your developer.
The simplest way to write the content for your website is to create a single Word document for each page on your website. At the top of each document, clearly write the name of the page and highlight it to indicate that it’s a page title and not necessarily content that needs to appear on the page itself.
It’s a good idea to make a list of all the pages first, before you actually start writing the content, so that you can visualise what pages are required for your website. Try to think like one of your customers and create the pages they will need to understand your products or services. For a corporate website design, you will need at least a home page, about us page, contact page, and of course pages for your products or services.
Start with the basics and once you have the hang of it, you should soon identify other pages that need to be on your website. Once you have the pages and their titles created, you can move forward and start writing your content.
In addition to writing your website’s content in each of the Word documents you have just created, it may also be helpful to highlight any comments in another colour, such as aqua or yellow. This helps your comments to stand out to the web developer when they browse your documents. You may also want to reference specific files or images within the content and again this is where you can use highlighting to help illustrate these points.
While every web developer will have their own process for adding content to corporate website designs, preparing your content this way will ensure that at the very least, you know what content you have on your own website, which is something that not many business owners actually know!
Finally, once you have created all the Word documents containing your website’s content (one document per page), you can share these with your web developer via email or using a file transfer service, such as wetransfer.com or dropbox.com.
Don’t want to write your own web content?
Some business owners are happy to write their own content and others shake their head in horror! Whichever camp you fall into, it’s actually a much better idea to leave the copy to a professional copywriter who can craft your content so that it reads well and is designed to convert visitors on your website.
After all, when you spend your hard earned money on a quality corporate website design for your business, you don’t want the copy to be the weak link. If you bite the bullet and engage a copywriter, you will still need to provide them with information for each page on your website and a list of bullet points is fine.
The investment in a copywriter will ensure that not only is your content written to a very high standard, but that it’s written for your specific target market. It will also be completed very quickly in most cases, meaning that your corporate website design will also be completed on time.
You might be happy to learn that at GO Creative, we offer professional copywriting services to our clients to ensure that we can complete their websites in a quick time frame. This means that you don’t have to worry about writing your own copy, you can simply leave it to the professionals.
If you want to explore using a professional copywriter for your corporate website design at GO Creative, simply give us a call and we can set it up for you.
