If you are thinking about commissioning a website, the most effective and time-saving thing you can do is generate your preliminary written content before any design work is done. A good digital design team will help you refine and shape that preliminary pass into a compelling site, but before that can happen, you need to decide what to say.

Messaging

First, write down the messages you’d like the site to communicate.

The messages don’t have to to be fancy. If you are a non-profit company that distributes used collar bells to needy cats, your messages might be: 

• Every cat should have a collar bell.
• We want you to send us your cat’s old collar bells.
• We have collection centers in three Pennsylvania locations.
• We will disburse all donations to cats on our waiting list.
• Needy cats should add themselves to the list. 

It’s tempting to spend a lot of team time on this, but in most cases, you’ll get the bulk of the messages by having one knowledgeable decision-maker spend five or ten minutes jotting down a list. 

First-Pass Copy

Second, assign or hire someone to write a first pass at the content. Ideally, the writer should have experience writing either web or general marketing content, but any good writer will do. That person should synthesise the messages with the supporting ideas that come from the rest of the team, and write a first pass at what will eventually become the website copy.

The first pass doesn’t have to look anything like a website—as long as it’s organized and reasonably complete, it could look like this blog post. Depending on the complexity of the messages, you should expect this to take from 4 to 8 hours to draft, plus a few hours of research or review time. 

If the website will have a lot of written content that can’t be generated quickly (for example, profiles and case studies of every recipient cat), the writer only needs to produce one representative sample to start. 

Design

That first written pass, in concert with other research and discovery findings and any other existing content (such as images or videos), will allow your web team to begin the design process. They can use your content to recommend an information architecture and navigation scheme, to ask follow up questions about your audience and mission, and determine initial features and page layouts. 

Web-Ready Content
After the big design decisions are made, the digital team will provide processes and advice to help your content creators refine the preliminary copy into web-ready content and produce supporting media (images, video, or audio) as needed. 

Developing content can feel like the most problematic element of creating a new website, but if you can spend just one day drafting preliminary narrative content at the beginning, you’ll streamline the design process, get a significant head start on content writing overall, and ultimately create a more cohesive website.