Content before design
It is always worth developing content before starting design.
Designing without content is designing blind. You can’t shape something that doesn’t exist.
Designing without content is like making cardboard boxes without knowing what will go in them. Some parts will be too big and feel vast and empty. Other parts will be too small, feeling squashed and tight.
Neither would be good design.
You might be tempted to change content to fit a design but, going back to the cardboard box metaphor, this is equivalent to twisting and bending an item to fit into the box.
You never, ever want to ruin good content so it can fit into your design.
But sometimes good content might not be available.
What to do if content isn’t ready yet
The first thing I would do is ask for a first draft and if that’s not available then create I would create my own. The important thing is to create content that is close to final. Make it as close to the final content as you can imagine.
Do not use ‘lorem ipsum’ or placeholder (‘heading 1’, ‘heading 2’, ‘John Smith’ etc) for your fake content.
You want to design based on real content not mumbo jumbo that will never appear on the site.
Creating content
I’m not a copywriter, so I can’t teach you how to create amazing content. What I can do is show you how I get started writing content.
I like to start in a Google doc (or any other word processor) and use the built in styles for headings, subheadings, lists and paragraphs etc. to structure everything. I write my content as if they were on my site from top to bottom, page by page.
Here is a Google docs that I created for the content of my redesigned website.
A few things to note:
- Every ‘Heading 1’ in the document is a new page and will become the ‘H1’ to the page.
- I’ve marked any dynamic content or content I’m not sure about with angled brackets.
- I even made a couple of design decisions by making words that I wanted to emphasise bold
- Finally, it doesn’t match the content on the site at all.
Creating good content is an iterative process. It can and probably will change and that’s okay. By having content created first, you have something to work with when you start your design.
Recommended reading
If you want to learn more about writing content for the web. Here are a few good books that have helped me: