How to prepare content for your website project

The most common reason a website project runs late has nothing to do with design or development. It is content: the photos that will arrive "next week", the About page nobody wants to write, the testimonial waiting on sign-off from a client who is on holiday. The work that stalls is almost never the work you are paying for. It is the material only you can provide.

The good news is that this is the one part of a project you control completely, and you can sort it before you have even chosen someone to build the site. Here is what to gather, what to leave rough, and who should actually write the words.

Why content is the thing that stalls

Content stalls projects for a boring reason: it usually has no owner. The designer assumes you are writing it. You assume it is included. Neither of you says this out loud, and the gap surfaces mid-project disguised as "just waiting on a few bits". Meanwhile the design is approved, the build is ready, and everything sits still.

A photo shoot that has not been booked, a price nobody wants to publish, a founder bio that keeps not getting written. None of these are design problems, and no amount of design fixes them. There is a whole post on where the time actually goes in a build, and content is the villain there too.

What to gather before you brief anyone

None of this needs to be polished. It needs to exist, in one folder, where you can find it.

What you do, in plain words. A page of notes explaining what you sell, how it works, roughly what it costs, and why someone would pick you over the obvious alternative. Write it the way you would explain it to a friend at a kitchen table, not the way your industry writes it. If you cannot explain it plainly, nobody you hire can explain it for you. They can only dress up the confusion.

Who the site is for. Who needs to be convinced, what they are worried about, and what they ask on every first call. The objections you answer over and over are the outline of your website, you just have not written it down yet. This shapes the structure of a site more than anything visual does.

Proof. Whatever demonstrates you are real and good at the job: past work, client names you have permission to mention, testimonials, qualifications, accreditations, press. Chase the permissions now. A testimonial that needs someone else's approval is the single most reliable source of "next week", and it costs nothing to ask early. If you are new and the proof is thin, say so. An honest site beats a padded one.

Photos and anything visual. Real photography of you, your team, your work or your product beats any amount of stock imagery. Gather what exists, however unglamorous. If nothing usable exists, make the decision now: book a photographer, or agree to launch with placeholders and swap them in later. Either is fine. The undecided option is the one that stalls builds.

The words you already have. Old site copy, brochures, proposals, the email you send when someone asks how you work, your LinkedIn summary. Most businesses have already written the bulk of their website, just in fragments scattered across five years of documents. Collect the fragments.

What not to polish

Here is the part that surprises people: you should not write the website. Not yet, and possibly not at all.

Designers work perfectly well from rough notes. Bullet points are usually better than finished paragraphs, because they carry the facts without locking in a structure that the design process will change anyway. If you spend three evenings polishing an About page written for the site you are imagining, and the project reveals a better shape, that polish is wasted. Worse, you will be reluctant to let it go.

So do not draft page-by-page copy. Do not wait for the perfect photo. Do not agonise over tone. Rough, honest and complete beats polished and partial every time.

Who should write the copy

There are three honest answers.

You write it yourself. This works if you write well and, crucially, if you will actually do it. Be truthful with yourself about both, because a project where the client is the copywriter is a project scheduled around the client's least favourite task.

You hire a copywriter. A real cost, and often worth it, particularly for larger sites where the words carry weight on every page.

The person designing the site drafts it. This is how I work: every Meko build includes draft copy written for you from your notes, so the project never stalls on a blank page. It also means the words and the layout are decided together rather than forced to fit each other afterwards. Your job becomes reviewing a draft for facts and tone, which is a far smaller one than producing it. Most people are better editors of their own story than authors of it.

Whichever route you choose, decide it before the project starts and write the decision down. Copy is a real cost when someone has to produce it, which is one of the reasons it shows up in how projects are priced.

Do it before you compare quotes

Gathering your content early does not just protect the schedule. It changes the conversations you have with whoever you brief, because the scope becomes concrete: this many services, this much proof, photography exists or it does not. Concrete scope gets you accurate quotes instead of optimistic ones.

Ten minutes with the project brief builder will turn the folder into a brief you can hand to anyone. And with the content question settled before kickoff, a typical marketing site takes around three weeks instead of drifting for months.

None of this needs to be good. It needs to exist. One folder, rough notes, honest answers. Most stalled projects are missing exactly that.