Free Website Content Planner: Every Page, Prompted

Quick answer

Website builds do not stall on design or code; they stall waiting for content, and they stall because “send us your text and photos” is a blank-page task nobody schedules. This planner replaces the blank page with prompts per page: answer them in rough bullets over an evening or two, hand the answers over, and a £299–£499 build proceeds at full speed. Copy the tables, fill them in any order, and note the calibration data in the chart: content delay is the number one schedule-killer in small-business web projects, and it is entirely preventable for £0.

The planner: core pages (copy from here)

The supporting content (same sitting, ten more minutes)

Why prompts beat “send us your content” every time

The blank page asks you to be a copywriter; the prompt asks you to answer questions about your own business, which you can do in a van, at a kitchen table, by voice-note. The psychology is the whole trick: specific questions produce specific raw material, rough bullets are explicitly allowed (polishing is the builder’s job, or a light copy pass inside the build), and progress is visible row by row instead of looming as one giant task. It is the same mechanism as our design brief template, applied to the largest content job a small business faces, and the two documents together remove the most common failure modes from the entire commissioning process.

The order that gets sites live fastest

Not all rows are equal, so fill them in earning order. First the homepage prompts and the facts sheet, because every other page borrows from them. Second, your TOP TWO service pages, the ones that make the money, so the build can start on the pages that matter while the long tail follows. Third, photos, started early because daylight and job access are schedule-dependent in a way typing is not. About, contact and the remaining services can trail by days without delaying anything. Builders sequence exactly this way internally; a client who delivers in this order compresses a five-week straggle into the five-day build the one-page tier advertises, and the redesign timeline stops depending on archaeology.

Writing prompts into good answers: three rules

Rule one: write like you answer the phone. The way you explain a service to a caller is almost always better copy than the way you write it formally; if typing stiffens you, dictate. Rule two: numbers beat adjectives: “returned to fit 400+ bathrooms since 2015” outsells “high quality workmanship” in every test anyone has run, so raid your records for real figures before reaching for superlatives. Rule three: answer the objection you always hear: every business has the question that stalls buyers (price? mess? timescales?), and the page that answers it in writing converts the silent majority who would never have asked. A readability pass through a free tool like Hemingway catches the sentences that grew three clauses too long, and the builder’s polish does the rest.

Who writes what (the honest division of labour)

You own: the prompt answers, the facts, the photos, the proof, because these cannot be invented on your behalf, and every builder who claims otherwise is about to fill your site with plausible generic filler. The builder owns: structure, headline polish, calls to action, the on-page SEO layer (titles, descriptions, heading phrasing matched to real searches, per Google’s own helpful-content guidance: content written for people, structured for search). The overlap zone, tone and final wording, goes to whoever is better at it, decided honestly. This split is exactly what flat-price builds assume, which is why content readiness, not budget, is usually what separates a smooth from-£499 build from a stalled one.

Special cases: redesigns, one-pagers, and e-commerce

Redesigning rather than starting fresh? Do the planner anyway, but start each row by pasting the OLD page’s text and marking keep/update/kill, which converts audit and authorship into one pass and preserves anything currently ranking (the redirect-and-retain rules live in the redesign guide). Building a one-pager? The planner collapses: homepage prompts plus your single service’s row plus the facts sheet is the entire content requirement, one honest evening. E-commerce? Add per-product rows (title, plain description, specs, price, photos from angles) and multiply the photo discipline, because product pages live and die on it, as the no-sales diagnosis shows from the failure side.

The planner in a team (two-minute setup)

Where more than one person holds the knowledge, split the planner by rows rather than by committee: whoever runs the jobs answers the service prompts, whoever answers the phone owns the contact and objection rows, the founder does home and about, and one named person merges and owns the final document. Parallel answering turns the evening into an hour, and the merge step catches the contradictions (two different service descriptions, two claimed founding years) before the website inherits them. The one rule that keeps team planners honest: bullet answers only until the merge, because polished paragraphs written separately never join cleanly.

Keep it, reuse it, and the one habit after launch

The filled planner outlives the build: it becomes the source document for every future edit, the brief for any freelancer touching the site, and the baseline the next redesign audits against, so store it with your brand assets rather than in a dead email thread. Post-launch, one habit keeps it true: when prices, services or areas change in reality, change them in the planner and on the site in the same sitting, because drift between reality and website is how trust leaks one visitor at a time. The planner is free, the discipline is free, and together they are most of what separates websites that work from expensive brochures; the build itself, when you want it done properly, is priced flat on the price list.