Preparing web content
Sorry for the delay in writing these posts for those that don’t know I broke my ankle on the race snowboard which has meant an operation, two pins and some heavy downtime. This has given me time, however, to work on a lot of the content that has been needed on many of our new partner sites (in particular, Breathe New Zealand, Wayward Bus and Adventure Tours Australia, and Backpacking Queensland). None of these sites are live yet, but they are all in that phase of production where we need to be getting the first round of content in.
There is that rule that 20% of the work takes 80% of the time; which in the case of creating a website is certainly the case. One of the biggest problems I seem to come up against over and over is the unpreparedness of website managers of exactly what content is to go on what page when the time comes. It seems to take an eternity to get from site designed and developed to finalising the content stage.
One of the tricks I use is to create a word document writing the first page and then creating all the hyperlinks to other pages within that first page text. By building up the headings for those other pages you very quickly build up a framework for the whole site. It is just a case then of going back and filling in the content. But, better still you can suddenly see how the content fits into the designed site and what more design and development is required. That is, assuming you did not write all the content first, before you got the website designed - which of course, you did!
Tags: Web design