Content Documents Are the Right Way to Send Your Website Content to a Designer
– By #RSA
The time has come to take your business online. You need a website to help people find you and help sell your product or service. You want a custom website, and you plan to hire a digital marketing agency to create one for you. That should be all you need to know, right? Well, not quite. For the agency to build your perfect website, you’ve got to transfer the information they’ll use to populate the website. Rather than sending dozens of emails or creating wonky layout mockups, skip the headache and forgotten details and prepare a thoroughly planned, beautifully organized content document.
How should you build your content document? Here’s a checklist to examine before you send it off:
The process of building a website is already challenging enough. Avoid making it worse by requesting complex changes after the fact. Making changes to a Word or text document is easy, but making changes to a website takes time. Ensure your content is in its final form before you send it, and avoid creating unnecessary headaches later on.
Use page breaks and start each web page on a new page in your document. Your website will be structured this way, so logically your content document should be structured similarly. Your designer will thank you when they can quickly scan your document and easily find specific pages.
Minimize the number of styles in your document– use one font color for the actual content and another color for notes. Resist the urge to design or mock up any features. Your designer only wants text and images from you, so you should use your distinctly formatted notes to explain complex elements like sliders or pop-ups. Share a link to an example, or talk with your designer if you are struggling to describe it.
Style every element type and heading the same. Same with your body text, lists, and anything else.
In your document, rather than embedding images, you should write the filename of the image you’d like included in that location when the developer builds the page. That will keep your document’s file size from getting too large. The developers won’t use those images anyway, so send your high-resolution images separately either via an external hard drive, flash drive, Dropbox link, Google Drive, or other cloud-based file sharing service.
Implement these content document essentials and your web designer will have clear, easy-to-follow instructions that'll ensure your website gets built the way you want it to.
If your business needs a new website or your existing website could use a facelift, you’ll want to consult an expert. Rapid City web design company Robert Sharp & Associates has built hundreds of websites for businesses across all industries around the country. As a full-service marketing agency, our talented team can help you with every step of the process your business could possibly need to reach its target audience and convert them into loyal customers.
Contact us today for a free website development quote!
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