Process
How to prepare content before a website build
Write the copy for every page, gather photographs, and collect your legal and business details before the build starts. Content is the single most common cause of overrun, and it is almost always the client’s to supply.
Before you start
- A page list agreed with your developer
- Someone who can write, or a budget to commission it
The steps
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Step 1: Agree the page list first
You cannot write copy for a structure nobody has decided.
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Step 2: Write the home page last
It summarises everything else, so it is easier once the other pages exist.
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Step 3: Write to the buyer’s objections
What is this, is it for me, what does it cost, what happens next. In that order.
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Step 4: Gather real photographs
Your own work, at full resolution. Stock imagery measurably reduces trust.
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Step 5: Collect the business details
Trading name, registered address, VAT number, phone, opening hours — exactly as they appear elsewhere.
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Step 6: Decide the legal pages
Who is writing the privacy policy and terms, and whether they will be tailored to what the site collects.
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Step 7: Name a deadline and an owner
Per page. This single step protects the launch date more than anything else.
Why this stretches projects more than code does
Design and build are estimable because the same person does them repeatedly. Copy is usually the client’s job, is harder than it looks, and gets scheduled around a week that was already full. Weeks disappear here quietly and nobody notices until launch slips.
What to write if you are stuck
Answer the questions your customers already ask you. Your inbox and your phone calls are the brief — the questions that arrive repeatedly are exactly the ones the page has to answer, and they arrive pre-prioritised by frequency.
The background behind this
Writing a website brief that gets you comparable quotes covers the reasoning in about 3 minutes — free, ungated, written from client work.
Who wrote this
Anas Bin Masud builds e-commerce sites and does technical SEO for businesses in the UK, Canada, Ireland and Pakistan. These procedures are the ones I run on client work, written down rather than invented — including the ones where the honest answer is that the fix is not available on your current hosting.