Plan Your Website Content Before You Brief a Designer (It Halves the Project Pain)

Quick answer

The single biggest cause of website projects running late is not design or development. It is content: the copy nobody wrote, the photos nobody gathered, the services list nobody agreed. “Design first, content later” guarantees a beautiful skeleton waiting months for organs. The fix is cheap and unglamorous: before briefing anyone, spend a focused week producing a page inventory, a one-sentence job description for every page, the draft copy, and the proof assets (photos, reviews, numbers). Projects that arrive content-first finish faster, cost less (designers quote lower for defined scope) and convert better, because the site is built around the message instead of the message squeezed into the template.

Step 1: The page inventory (an hour)

List every page the site needs, and be ruthless about “needs”. The standard small-business skeleton: home, one page per major service (not one “services” dumping ground; separate pages are how you rank for separate offerings), about, proof (portfolio, case studies or reviews), and contact. Kill the pages that exist from habit: the “News” section that will die after three posts, the “Links” page from 2009. Each page you cut is copy you need not write and money you need not spend. Page count is a core driver of what a website costs.

Step 2: One job per page (an hour, the highest-value hour)

For every surviving page, write one sentence: who lands here, and what should they do next? “Homepage: a homeowner comparing three local firms decides we look most credible and clicks a service.” “Boiler page: someone with a broken boiler phones now.” That sentence decides the page’s headline, structure, and call to action, and settles every future design argument, because disagreements get resolved against the job, not against taste. A page with no answerable job goes back on the kill list.

Step 3: Draft the copy, with the rules that convert

• Write to one reader. “You need a boiler that just works” beats “we are a leading provider of heating solutions”. Count the you-to-we ratio in every draft; you should win.
• Front-load every page. The visitor decides in seconds whether to stay: benefit-led headline, one clarifying sentence, visible action (before any history lesson). The company story goes on the about page, condensed.
• Specifics are the persuasion. “Fitted in one day, tested, guaranteed for 10 years” outsells “high quality service” everywhere it is tried. Numbers, timescales, place names and process beat adjectives; adjectives are what every competitor also has.
• Write shorter than feels safe. First drafts run double their useful length. Halve them: reading is work, and every unnecessary sentence taxes the visitor toward the back button.
• Let the page’s search intent shape it. Each service page targets one primary phrase in the title, headline and naturally in the body: enough for structure, no keyword porridge. (The pillar-and-cluster logic behind which phrases go where is a planning input too: pages for services, posts for questions.)

Step 4: Gather the proof before the build

Copy asserts; proof convinces. Assemble it while writing, because gaps found now are fixable now: real photography of work, team and premises (why real beats stock, and a quarterly phone-photo habit fills most gaps free), reviews with permission to quote, the numbers you can defend (years, jobs, response time), accreditations with the actual logos, and two or three case stories in problem-work-result shape. A build that starts with proof in a folder ships weeks earlier than one that starts with “we will sort photos later” — later never comes, and stock fills the hole.

Step 5: Hand over a pack, not a promise

What the designer or agency should receive: the inventory, the job sentences, the drafted copy in one document per page, the proof folder, and your brand assets. From that, a professional (our process on WordPress builds included) can quote accurately, design around real content lengths, and hit deadlines that survive contact with reality. It also changes the power dynamic: you are commissioning execution of a defined thing, not paying by the hour for someone to drag the definition out of you. If the existing site is being replaced, fold this planning into the redesign checklist: the ranking-page inventory and this content plan are the same document, approached from two ends.

How much copy each page actually needs

“Draft the copy” is uselessly vague until you know how much. Designers need approximate lengths to lay out real templates, and writers need a target to stop at. Working figures for a small-business site:

For a typical five-service business that is roughly 5,000 to 7,000 words in total. At an honest 300 to 400 usable words an hour including thinking time, that is fifteen to twenty hours of writing — three days. Owners who budget “an evening” for content are why projects stall, and knowing the real figure up front is what lets you decide honestly whether to write it or buy it.

What it costs to buy the words instead of writing them

• UK copywriter, per page: commonly £120 to £400 for a service page, more for technical or regulated sectors. A full small-business site lands somewhere around £800 to £2,500.
• Interview-based writing: the version that works, because the writer extracts your actual expertise in a 60 to 90 minute call instead of paraphrasing your competitors. Expect the upper end of the range and consider it the money that buys specificity.
• Editing your own drafts: £60 to £150 a page, and frequently the best value on this list: you supply the knowledge, someone else supplies the discipline and the cut.
• AI-assisted first drafts: viable as raw material, dangerous as finished copy. The failure is not grammar but sameness — generated service pages read exactly like every competitor’s. Use it for structure; write the specifics yourself.

Whichever route you take, the writing rules that make a page rank and the writing rules that make it convert are the same rules, which is the substance of writing pages that rank without writing for robots, and it is worth reading before commissioning anyone, if only so you can tell a good draft from a padded one.

Get the search terms settled at planning stage, not after launch

The most expensive content mistake is structural: building six pages that all target roughly the same phrase, then wondering why none of them rank. It happens because page names come from how the business talks internally rather than from how customers search: “Domestic Division”, “Our Solutions”, “Commercial Offering”.

Fix it during the inventory, when it costs nothing. Beside each page in your list, write the one phrase a customer would type to find it, in their words. Then check for collisions: if two pages have the same phrase, they should probably be one page, or one of them needs a genuinely different angle. This is a half-day of work with free tools and it determines your URL structure, your navigation labels and your headline for the next five years. The method for finding phrases you can realistically win is in keyword research for beginners. Doing it after the site is built means either living with the wrong structure or paying for redirects and rewrites.

The legal and boilerplate pages nobody drafts

These are always assumed to be the designer’s job and are always the client’s, because only you have the information. Have them ready:

1. Company identification. A UK limited company must disclose its registered name, company registration number, place of registration and registered office address on its website, commonly in the footer or on the contact page. Sole traders must give a business address at which they can be contacted. This is a legal requirement, not a convention, and it is missing from a startling number of small-business sites.
2. VAT number, if registered, particularly anywhere you sell online.
3. Privacy notice covering the contact form, analytics and any marketing list, written to reflect what you actually do, not copied from a business that does something else.
4. Cookie information and consent, proportionate to what you actually load.
5. Terms of business or terms of sale, including cancellation rights if you sell to consumers online or off-premises.
6. Accessibility statement, if you want one; the accessibility decisions themselves belong in the content plan, since heading structure, link text and image descriptions are content choices before they are code choices.

Write the image alt text while drafting, too. It takes seconds per image at the writing stage and is a miserable retrofit across 60 images later.

The asset specification your photos need to meet

“Send us your photos” produces a folder of screenshots, WhatsApp compressions and 2011 wedding-quality JPEGs. Specify instead:

• Resolution: minimum 2,000 pixels on the long edge for anything used full-width. Phone photos qualify; images pulled from Facebook do not, because the platform has already stripped them.
• Originals only. Never anything forwarded through a messaging app. The recompression is irreversible.
• Coverage: for each service, at least one before, one in-progress and one finished shot. In-progress photos convince more than finished ones, because they show the work rather than the outcome.
• People: real faces, including yours. A team photo taken on an overcast day against a plain wall outperforms an expensive studio portrait that looks like a stock library.
• Permissions: written consent to publish anything showing a customer’s home, premises, staff or children, collected at the time, not chased later.
• Logos of accreditations in vector or high-resolution form, downloaded from the issuing body rather than screenshotted from a certificate.

Sign-off: the process that stops the project drifting

Content projects rarely fail at writing; they fail at approval. Three rules prevent most of it. One named owner: a single person who consolidates all internal feedback and speaks to the designer, because contradictory instructions from three directors is the most reliable way to burn a fortnight. One document per page, with dated versions, so that “the version we approved” is a fact rather than a memory. And two review rounds, booked in the calendar: one on structure before any writing polish, one on final copy. Reviewing structure and wording simultaneously produces round seven and a resentful designer.

The last thing to agree before handover is what happens after launch, which is the question everybody defers. Content is not a one-off deliverable: service pages need updating as your offer changes, proof needs refreshing as jobs complete, and any ongoing search visibility depends on publishing that continues after the build. Decide now whether that is a monthly hour in your own calendar or an outsourced arrangement. The realistic options and prices are in content marketing and blog writing, because a site that is perfect on launch day and untouched for three years is a common and entirely avoidable outcome. Fold the final content checks into the pre-launch process itself; the full sequence of what to verify before and after going live is set out in the website launch checklist.

Sources & Further Reading

• How Users Read on the Web, Nielsen Norman Group
• Helpful Content Guidance, Google
• Writing for Users, GOV.UK Content Design