Almost every website project we've run late has been late because of content rather than design or build: the words, the photographs, the twelve product descriptions someone was going to write in July. If you're weighing up a $20,000 redesign, the content question deserves more attention than the choice of studio, because it's the part only you can solve.
Why content is the thing that slips
Design work has an obvious owner: we make it, you respond to it. Content sits in an awkward place, because it needs your knowledge and our structure while competing with everything else in your week. A director who blocks out Thursday afternoon for the About page loses it to a supplier problem, and the page slides to next Thursday.
The quieter cost is that a stalled project loses its rhythm. We finish the design, hand over the templates, then wait six weeks for copy, by which point everyone has to reload the job in their heads. On something that runs ten to sixteen weeks, momentum does more work than people expect, and content gaps break it.
Content that arrives late and rushed gets written to fill boxes rather than to say anything, so you end up paying for a considered design carrying filler text. That is a strange way to spend twenty thousand dollars. We would rather build fewer pages that are properly written, and we will say so while we are scoping the work.
How much content you actually need
A typical site we build has between eight and twenty real pages: home, what you do, three or four service pages, an about page, a contact page, and whatever proof you can offer. For a lot of businesses that is the whole job, and everything beyond it was inherited from the old site because nobody wanted to delete it.
List the pages on your current site and mark the ones you would be embarrassed to lose. In our experience the honest answer comes in under half. The rest are pages someone made in 2018 for a campaign that finished, or a news section with three posts from four years ago. Deleting them costs nothing and takes an afternoon.
Word counts make the job schedulable, so these are the numbers we plan against. A service page usually needs 400 to 700 words, a homepage needs less than you would guess at 250 to 400 because it is mostly signposting, and a case study runs 300 to 500. For a fifteen page site that totals six to eight thousand words.
Who should write it
The person who talks to customers most is usually the right writer, whatever their job title says. Somebody who has answered the same seven questions a hundred times on the phone already knows what the site needs to say. If that is your sales lead or your office manager rather than you, hand it over and give them time back elsewhere.
We have watched content go to a group of four people, each assuming one of the others had started, so we now ask for one named owner. Where several people do have to contribute, split the work by page and put a single name and date against each. Reviews can involve everyone, as long as the drafting sits with one person.
Occasionally the right answer is that nobody in the building should be writing it. If the business is technical enough that the writing needs real subject knowledge, and the only person with that knowledge is also the person running the company, you will wait a long time. Research centres and industrial clients hit this constantly, which is why our work with manufacturing and engineering firms in Ireland starts with interviews.
The interview approach, and what it costs
When the writing is not going to happen, we record conversations instead. Dave spends an hour with you and an hour each with two or three colleagues, asks what a customer would ask, and turns the transcripts into draft pages you correct. Correcting facts is quicker than facing a blank document, and most people are more articulate speaking than typing.
This is a real line item, between $2,000 and $6,000 depending on how many pages we need and how many people we talk to, plus two or three weeks on the schedule. On a $20,000 project that is a meaningful share of the budget. The test is whether the content would otherwise get written at all, because two idle months cost more.
The other thing interviews give you is the way you actually talk about the work. Businesses write about themselves in a stiffer register than they speak in, and the spoken version is nearly always better. Clients have read back an interview page and said it sounds like them, which rarely happens with copy written at eleven at night.
Writing a brief that does not waste your morning
If you are writing it yourself, the page is the wrong place to begin. For each one, write three lines first: who lands here, what they are worried about, and what you want them to do next. Ten minutes of that per page makes the writing much faster, because you are not choosing a tone before you have decided what to say.
After that, the quickest method is to answer questions rather than compose prose. Take the real questions customers ask and write the answer the way you would say it on the phone, without tidying it. We would rather have a plain, slightly rambling answer with the facts in it than a polished paragraph that says very little.
Give us the awkward material as well: the thing you are slower at than competitors, the price band you do not publish, the project that went sideways and what you changed afterwards. Some of it will never appear on the site, though it shapes what does. How pages get planned and sequenced is covered in our notes on content strategy.
Things you can do this week without spending anything
Open a folder and start filling it with every photograph you have of the premises, the team and work in progress, plus any certifications, testimonials sitting in old emails, and your last three tender responses. Those proposals usually hold the clearest description of what the business does that exists anywhere in the company.
Then mark every page on the current site as keep, rewrite or bin, and be hard about the bin column. Bringing that list to a first meeting with any studio changes the conversation, because you are discussing a defined scope rather than an open question, and the quotes you get back will be closer to what you actually pay.
Photography is the next most common cause of a late project after copy, partly because it depends on weather and on how the premises look on the day. A half day in Vancouver runs between $800 and $2,000. Booking it in week two rather than week ten removes a whole category of delay, and the images are yours whoever builds the site.
What we will tell you if the content is not ready
Sometimes the honest advice is to wait, and we will give it. If you are midway through a rebrand, or the one person who understands the technical side is leaving in six weeks, you would be building the site around information that is about to be wrong. Saying so costs us the work in the short term and saves both of us a rebuild.
More often the right move is to reduce the scope rather than delay the whole thing. Build the eight pages you can properly write, launch those, and add the rest over the following six months as a small ongoing piece of work. That gets you a live site sooner and spreads the writing across a period where it is realistic.
Occasionally the answer is that you do not need a new site at all. Where the content is thin and the structure underneath is sound, better writing on the pages you already have will do more than a redesign, and we have told people exactly that. It is an odd position for a studio to take, though it saves you twenty thousand dollars.