How to Prepare Content for Your New Website (Checklist)

Here is the thing almost nobody tells you before a website project starts: the design is rarely what holds it up. The content is.

A build that was quoted at six weeks becomes four months, and if you trace back why, it is almost always the same story — the team is waiting on the "About" text, or the product descriptions, or photographs of the premises that nobody has taken yet. The design is finished and sitting in a folder while everyone waits for words.

The good news is that this is entirely preventable, and preventing it does not require writing skill. It requires knowing what to gather. This guide walks through exactly that: what text each page needs, where images legally come from, which legal pages you cannot skip, and how to hand the whole lot over so nothing gets lost.

Why content should come before design

There is a temptation to treat content as something you pour into a design once the design is done. It is a natural assumption and it causes most of the delay in website projects.

Design is a container. A designer laying out a homepage needs to know whether your headline is six words or sixteen, whether you have three services or eleven, whether you have a real customer quote or none. Guess wrong and the page has to be redrawn when the real content arrives — and "redrawn" means time, which means either a later launch or a bigger invoice.

You do not need finished, polished copy before design begins. You need to know what exists. A rough paragraph in a document is infinitely more useful to a designer than a promise that something will arrive later. Placeholder text hides problems; rough real text reveals them while they are still cheap to fix.

The practical rule: gather everything in rough form before design starts, then refine during the build. That sequence is what keeps projects on schedule.

The text you need, page by page

Work through your site one page at a time. For most small business websites the list is shorter than people fear.

Homepage. One clear sentence saying what you do and for whom — this is the hardest sentence on the whole site, so start it early. Then a short paragraph expanding on it, a list of your main services or products with a line each, one or two pieces of proof (a customer quote, a recognisable client, a number you can stand behind), and a clear statement of what you want visitors to do next.

About. When and why the business started, who is involved, and what makes your approach different. Resist the corporate voice here. The About page is one of the most visited pages on most small business sites, and people read it looking for reassurance that real humans are involved.

Services or products. For each one: what it is, who it suits, what is included, roughly what it costs or how pricing works, and what happens when someone gets in touch. If you sell products, you also need proper descriptions rather than manufacturer text — specifications, sizes, materials, and what makes each one worth buying.

Contact. Address, phone, email, opening hours, and what to expect after someone submits a form. "We reply within one working day" is a small sentence that measurably increases the number of people who send the form.

Proof pages. Testimonials with a real name and company where you have permission, case studies or project write-ups, logos of clients you are allowed to name, and any certifications or memberships.

A tip that saves everyone time: write in a plain document, not in an email chain and not in your head. One file per page, named after the page.

Images — what you need and where to get them

Images are where most content preparation quietly goes wrong, and the failure is usually legal rather than aesthetic.

What to gather: your logo in the highest quality you have — ideally the original vector file rather than a screenshot; photographs of your team, premises, work or products; and any diagrams or illustrations you already own.

Where images may legally come from. There are exactly three safe sources: photographs you or an employee took, images you commissioned with the rights transferred to you in writing, and stock images you have licensed. That is the complete list.

Images found through a search engine are not free to use. This catches people out constantly and the consequence is not theoretical — image licensing companies actively scan the web for unlicensed use and send invoices. If you are unsure where a picture on your current site came from, that uncertainty is itself a good reason to replace it.

Practical quality notes. Send originals, not versions that have been through a messaging app, which compresses them heavily. Consistency matters more than perfection — eight photographs taken on the same day in the same light will look more professional than eight excellent photographs taken over five years in different styles. And if you have no usable photography at all, say so early: commissioning a photographer takes weeks to arrange, and finding that out in week five of a six-week project is how launches slip.

While you are gathering files, this is also the moment to check you actually hold the original editable versions of your logo and brand assets. If a previous designer only ever sent you flat images, ask for the source files now — you have more leverage before you need them urgently.

The legal pages you cannot skip

Every website needs a few pages that nobody enjoys writing. They are not optional, and in several jurisdictions they are legally required.

Privacy policy. Required if you collect any personal data at all — and a contact form counts. It must explain what you collect, why, how long you keep it, who else sees it, and how someone can ask for their data to be deleted.

Cookie notice. Required if your site uses analytics, embedded video, or advertising tools. Most sites use at least one without realising.

Terms and conditions. Essential if you sell anything online — covering payment, delivery, returns and cancellations. Advisable even if you do not.

Accessibility statement. Increasingly expected, and required for many organisations depending on sector and location.

A word of caution: generic templates copied from another website are a genuinely bad idea, because they describe someone else's data practices rather than yours, which is precisely the thing the law is asking you to disclose accurately. Use a reputable generator that asks about your actual setup, or take proper advice if you handle sensitive data. Your web team can build the pages, but the content of a privacy policy is a legal matter, not a design one.

How to hand it all over

Content that exists but cannot be found is content that does not exist. A tidy handover saves days.

Create one folder — cloud storage is ideal — and inside it, one subfolder per page of the site, named exactly as the page will be named. Put that page's text document and its images in the matching subfolder. Add a top-level folder for brand assets: logo files, any brand guidelines, fonts you own.

Then add one short document at the root listing every page of the site and its status: ready, in progress, or not started. That single file eliminates most of the back-and-forth in a typical build, because at any moment both sides can see exactly what is outstanding.

Two final habits worth adopting. Name files descriptively — about-page-text.docx rather than final-v3-USE-THIS.docx. And keep one version of the truth: if you revise a paragraph, revise it in the folder, not in an email reply, or two versions will end up on the live site.

If you would like to see how this fits into the wider project, our work process page shows where content preparation sits relative to design and build, and the web programming and WordPress service pages explain what happens to your content once it is handed over.

Start with the hardest sentence

If this all feels like a lot, start with one thing: the single sentence on your homepage that says what you do and who for. Everything else on the site is an elaboration of it, and getting it right makes every other page easier to write.

Then work through the pages in order of importance rather than order of appearance. Homepage, then whichever service or product page matters most commercially, then contact, then the rest. If a launch date is approaching and something has to give, it should be the page that gets fifty visits a year rather than the one that gets five thousand.

Questions about your specific situation? Book a free consultation — no obligation.