It’s website season! During the first quarter of the year, our project board is chock full of website projects as usual. Many clients aren’t sure what their web designer or developer needs when we say “website content.” This brief, practical guide will show you how to create content for your new website.
First, website content is all the text, images, video, and graphics that visitors interact with on your website. It’s easy to get bogged down in selecting images or writing page copy, but remember that it all has to work together. Your website is a representation of your business, so your website content has to tell your audience who you are and why you’re the best at what you do.
What’s Included in Your Website Content?
We always say that the hardest part of building a website isn’t the tech – it’s the content! And that’s because so much more planning, editing, and revisions are required. In fact, that’s the main reason we started offering content services to our clients. This is also where website planning shows its value.
Images
If you don’t have any recent pictures of your products or your team, you absolutely should hire a professional to take those photos. Your site quality will immediately improve with professional photos that capture the essence of working with you. You can fill in with high-quality stock photos if necessary but select those very carefully so that your site doesn’t come off as fake. You don’t want to derail your credibility by using the same generic images that show up everywhere.
Video
If you want to add a commercial or explainer video to your website, you’ll need to add that to the planning schedule as well.
Website Copy
If you’re going to tackle writing your website copy (copy=text) yourself, be sure to leave yourself more than enough time to get it done. Don’t use your speed of completing homework assignments in high school as a guide to your productivity.
Your website’s marketing language is what works hardest on your website to convert the sale. So you want to make sure that you’re not just posting whatever comes to mind – even if you’re brilliant!
Before you begin to write, spend some time doing market & keyword research in your industry. This will help you build your website traffic as potential customers find you via search engines. Your goal is generally a minimum of 300 words per page so that search engines will take note of your content. This is not a hard and fast requirement, but it’s a good rule of thumb to go by as you create content for your website.
Your Website Content Checklist
- Page Content – Usually Home, About, Services, Contact, +1 specific to your business or organization
- Service / Program Descriptions (and sometimes landing pages)
- Blog Posts – Show off your expertise and add more SEO juice to your site
- Transactional Emails – Purchase confirmations, appointment, automated contact form responses, webinar logistics
- Nurturing Emails – Keeping leads and customers informed, entertained, and thinking of you
Most web professionals will want you to deliver your text content in a Word or Google doc so it’s easy to copy and paste into your website pages. Make sure you use headings to separate the content into the pages and sections where it should go. Proofreading usually isn’t included, so make sure you do a quality check on your text before you send it over.
Don’t forget that the photos, the video, and the text documents all have to be delivered to your web designer (or developer) to be added to your site with plenty of time for updates and edits before your site delivery.
Now that you know how to create content for your new website – it’s time to get to work!
