Hi guys
I am looking for some quality information (links, blog posts, your thoughts) on the correct process in creating a site for someone. In particular, how to get content and navigation sorted.
Do you ask them what sort of pages they want etc, and ask them to come up with the basic content before you begin work?
It would seem to me that this would be the best way to work. For some, I feel I could create better content than they could (I am fortunate to have been on a web writing course through work). Do you ever write their content for them as an additional service?
I really don’t do web writing, though there are those on this forum (DCrux, who has a web site about writing content for the web) who say front-enders should also be content writers. That or they should be working with a copywriter.
Certainly writing for the web is a separate skill that your client doesn’t necessarily have, meaning someone should do it for them.
If you read Dutch, Schrijven voor Internet by Aartjan van Erkel is a great place for usability/writing blog articles. He’s also written a book (Verleiden Op Internet), but I dunno if it will ever be translated to English and published. I’ve been reading it… it’s pretty good. Plenty of examples of some site changing the text of a button and seeing a huge increase in clicks/sales.
Here’s an English example of button text change from Jared Spool: The $300 million button.
While a copywriter is best, if there isn’t one involved and if your own copywriting isn’t 100%, at the very least, you can focus on things like the navigation, call-to-action buttons and header text. Those things are written differently for the web than they are for print, so even if your client already has some good print stuff, it shouldn’t just be pasted onto their site like that.
Plenty of sites come up in DuckDuckGo when I ask it for Writing for Internet but I am not familiar with any of them. Certainly I feel my biggest mistakes when doing work-outside-of-work for other people were not focusing enough on the content, and not talking enough with the clients before writing a lick of code.
Great advice, thanks. I read that artcile and it’s really interesting. Thanks again.
I am also looking for a good checklist, of things to do when building a site, if anyone knows any. I can goggle, but I am interested to kjnow what the sitepoint commuinity uses
Creating a great website can be very easy if someone follows few steps while creating it. Website should be categorized clearly in the sub-categories for its content. It shouldn’t be placed everywhere. But should be structured on the page also. In the navigation, all the related content should be easy to access.
If you are putting money on content creation, it has to be presented in a proper structure on web page too. Content creation is a specialized work and many client get their content written from professional, not themselves, as it gives a better content to their website.
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if you go back, there are a lot of blog posts in regards to content writing as well as much of the other issues you touched on.