This is the third in a 5-part Series on Things to Consider Before Hiring a Web Designer. You can catch the whole series in episodes 106 – 110.
For those of you that don’t know, in addition to this podcast, I not only teach WordPress through my 5 Day Website Challenge, but I also do one-on-one client work, and what pains me the most is when someone comes to me desperate because they’ve had a bad experience with another web designer.
So this series is designed to empower you to find the right designer and know what to expect along the way.
Today we’re talking about your content.
So what does that even mean?
It’s a pretty broad term, right?
In the simplest sense, it refers to the words and images on your website. That’s your “website content.”
But what you may not realize is the sheer volume of content on your website!!
Sure, we’ve got the Home Page, About Page, Contact Page, Work with Me Page, and the Blog, right? And we’ll need a logo, and some images, and great, I can pull all of that together for my designer over a weekend and I’ll be good to go, this project should only take a couple weeks, right??
Oh, BFF, if only it were that simple!!
In fact, I naively thought it could be that simple when I first started my web design business. I offered my Done For You packages with a 5 day turnaround time.
Great, you want to book a project with me, awesome, here’s a list of everything I need from you and off you go!! Once you get me EVERYTHING on that list, it’ll take me just 5 days to build the website.
And it does take me just 5 days to build a website – from the time I get the content.
But then, I’d never get all the content. And I couldn’t understand why. Why would someone pay me, and then not give me what I need to do the job? How irresponsible!!!
And I used to get SOOOO frustrated with it because I couldn’t schedule that 5-day development block and it would just be LOOMING out there.
I was putting REALLY high expectations on my clients.
Here’s what I wasn’t doing – putting myself in my clients’ shoes.
They’ve never built a website before!! It’s overwhelming to get this big list of stuff that you have to do, and you have to make so many decisions and pull together so much information… It’s a lot!
Like unless someone is REALLY ready when they come to me, and like, honestly, they think they are, but they really aren’t, it’s going to take some time to pull this together.
Going back to the analogy I introduced in Episode 106 that building a website is like building a home – can you imagine if you went to meet with a builder and they gave you a list of all the decisions you needed to make and they said, Okay, come back in a week with all of those decisions made! Yeah, like that’s going to well…
So what I realized… is that as fast as people SAY they want to turn a project like this around, when they understand the amount of work that goes into on their part – and I would venture to say that YOU as the client, are going to be spending just as much time as your developer on the project on only the things YOU can do, they can’t really turn around the CONTENT as fast as they think can.
So I started actually building the content gathering piece into my projects. With weekly check-in meetings to really hold my clients’ hand and guide them through anything, they had questions on what I was asking them for and that has been a total game changer for my projects!
So here’s a list of things you can expect to have ready for your web designer before they can start your project:
- Access to your accounts to get everything set up for you.
- Links to all of your social media accounts
- Photographs of you – so you may need to hire a photographer and allow turnaround time for that.
- A clear picture of how you plan to market yourself.
- A clear picture of how you want to sell your products and services.
- Your website copy for all of your pages – Home, About, Services, Contact – so either working with a copywriter and having that all done for you, doing it yourself or maybe your designer offers that service – having that ready is key.
- Your branding needs to be ready. So if there’s a logo being made and fonts and colors being chosen – maybe your designer is doing that, or maybe you hired someone else to create your branding and now your designer is bringing it to life online – they need all of the files optimized for web and the appropriate sizes.
- Something a lot of people don’t think about – privacy policy, terms and conditions.
- Blog posts, featured images, & SEO keywords.
- Blog sidebar – what do you want on your sidebar? Images and copy for all of that.
- Your email opt-in – whatever you’re giving away in exchange for an email address, PLUS the call to action, and the copy for all of the emails.
- Your contact form and the success message.
So that’s just the basic list – if you’re doing an e-commerce store or a membership site, there’s even more.
So here’s the deal – this process doesn’t need to be overwhelming! Your designer should be able to walk you through this process and build time into the schedule or plan for you to gather this and they should be able to help guide you and answer your questions as you’re pulling it all together.
It’s when the TIME isn’t made for this process on either side that you can run into trouble!
Give yourself plenty of time to pull all of the content together!! You’ll do the heavy lifting up front, and then you can sit back, relax and let your designer take it from there!
Today’s pep talk is brought to you by Bluehost. Go to www.shannonmattern.com/bluehost and get 36 months of web hosting for just $2.95 a month. That’s less than one trip to Starbucks a month – and if you’re anything like me, you’re at Starbucks more than that!
Then you can sign up for my Free 5 Day Website Challenge at www.shannonmattern.com/5day and I’ll show you step by step how to get started building your new website for your side hustle.
