How to Prepare Content for a New Website

Few things beat the excitement of a website project in full swing. The designs are looking brilliant, the developers are getting stuck in and everyone’s got their hands full bringing the whole thing to life. Then somebody has to ruin the mood by asking about the content. Cue the sudden realisation that nobody’s written a word of it.

Turns out there’s a small mountain of copy to write, hundreds of images to organise and a collection of old blog posts nobody’s looked at since 2017.

And that launch date everyone’s got circled in their calenders? Well, that’s just been kicked a little further down the road.

Website content has a funny way of becoming tomorrow’s problem. Until tomorrow arrives and you’ve got a beautiful website crying out for some content.

So, where do you start?

1. Have a good rummage through your existing content

Before you start writing everything from scratch, it’s worth seeing what you’ve already got. And if you’re still working out whether it’s time for a new website in the first place, we’ve got a few thoughts on when to redesign your business website.

Most websites collect an impressive amount of stuff over the years. Old service pages, forgotten blog posts, photographs of people who left three years ago and the odd page collecting digital dust.

Tempting as it might be to have a good old clear-out, don’t be too quick with the delete button. Some of those dusty old pages could still be doing a rather decent job of attracting visitors and generating enquiries.

This is where a good content audit comes in. It helps you make sensible decisions about what deserves a place on your new website, rather than dragging everything across out of habit.

We like to keep things simple:

• Keep: Still pulling its weight and giving people what they came for.
• Improve: Worth keeping, but could do with a little love.
• Combine: A few pages covering the same ground? Might be time to bring them together.
• Remove: Outdated, irrelevant or no longer serving any real purpose.

Just check how pages are performing before waving goodbye to them. You don’t want to accidentally bin something Google’s rather fond of.

2. Work out what your new website needs to say

Here’s where things can get a little muddled. You’ve got a lovely new sitemap, beautiful page designs and a pretty good idea of how everything should look.

There’s just one small detail nobody’s quite figured out. What on earth are we going to say on each page?

Put yourself in your customers’ shoes for a moment. What do they want to find out? What might they be unsure about? And what would help them feel confident enough to take the next step?

Once you’ve got a better idea of what your visitors need, it’s time to look at where everything fits.

Perhaps three old service pages would be much happier rolled into one. Or maybe there’s an obvious gap where a question your sales team hears every other day should be answered.

The trick is to build your content around how people actually use your website, rather than trying to squeeze everything into a layout that’s already been decided.

3. Give your words and imagery some attention

You could have the most beautiful new website this side of the internet, but if it’s filled with blurry photography and copy that sounds like it was written by a committee, the whole thing starts to lose its charm.

And there’s something particularly cruel about a lovely new design making your old content look even more tired.

Take the opportunity to freshen things up.

Are you saying the right things about your business? Are you making life easy for your visitors? And does your writing have a bit of personality, or has it fallen into that familiar trap of sounding terribly professional and saying very little? It’s worth remembering that your brand voice is just as important as your visual identity

The same goes for imagery.

If you’re planning new photography or video, get the ball rolling early. These things take a little organising, and nobody wants to be hunting for a decent team photo the afternoon before launch.

Better still, get your designers and content people talking from the beginning. Words and visuals should be working together, not meeting each other for the first time five minutes before the website goes live.

4. Don’t leave your SEO behind

Before you start moving pages around, spare a thought for all the hard work your existing website’s been doing. Some of those pages have spent years building up a rather lovely relationship with Google.

Certain pages could have spent years building up their SEO rankings, earning backlinks and bringing potential customers through your digital front door.

You’d be daft to throw all that away.

Before migrating content, take a proper look at your SEO performance. Find out which pages are bringing in organic traffic, what keywords they’re ranking for and which ones have valuable backlinks pointing towards them.

Then make sure you’ve got a sensible plan for the new site.

That means considering search intent, page headings, meta descriptions, internal links and proper 301 redirects for URLs that are changing.

And if you’re combining or removing pages, make sure you’ve got proper redirects in place so visitors and search engines don’t end up wandering into a dead end.

A new website should give your SEO a helping hand, not leave you scratching your head over where all that lovely traffic disappeared to.

5. Give content its own place in the project plan

The thing about website content is that there’s always more to it than meets the eye. What looks like a fairly straightforward job can quickly take up a rather impressive chunk of the project timeline.

There’s copy to write, approvals to chase, photography to organise and a whole website to fill before anyone can even think about putting their feet up.

And just when you think everything’s sorted, along comes an email beginning with those famous last words: “Just one tiny thing…”

The trick is to give content the same attention as design and development from day one. Work out who’s doing what, agree some sensible deadlines and leave enough breathing room for uploading, checking and the inevitable last-minute tweaks.

Then there’s the final once-over. Are the buttons working? Do the links go where they’re supposed to? Have you sorted the image alt text?

And does everything still look hunky-dory on a phone? It’s the sort of work nobody gets particularly excited about, but you’ll be thanking your lucky stars, you did it before the website went live.

Getting your content ready for a new website?

Building a new website is a brilliant opportunity to get your content in shape.

Some things will be worth keeping, others could do with a rethink and a few probably deserve a polite farewell.

At Giant Peach, we bring content into the conversation from day dot. Our approach to website design and development means thinking about what your website needs to say, how people will use it and how everything fits together long before launch day.

Chat to the experts