How To Organize and Prepare Website Content

Learn why it’s important to prepare website content before you add it to your website, and how to get that done.

Sure, WordPress will let you update your website content easily: edit text, replace images, update links. But if you wait to edit this content until after it’s in your site, the end result will suffer.

This first phase, preparing your content and getting it ready properly, saves you and your team a lot of time and avoids headaches. With your content ready, the site launches on schedule and ready to bring in new business.

The pros and cons of completing content before or after we build the site

It comes down to three steps: collaborate, organize, and review. Let’s get started.

Step 1: Team collaboration

In a team of two or more, working together is a big part of any project’s success. Let’s get on the same page (pun intended) so everyone knows what they are working on.

What are we collaborating on?

The content for your project: text, images, links to videos, and so on. Whether the project is a brochure, a website, or an email newsletter, agreeing as a team on what text to use, what images to include, and what links go where is vital before any of it is added. Our website process is a linear, progress-oriented approach that helps everyone stay on track and get things done.

• Select your best communicators as your collaboration team.

How do we collaborate?

There are several options for document collaboration. The best way to keep content organized, accessible, and up to date is to use a cloud-based service like Google Drive, Dropbox, or iCloud. These shared environments let multiple team editors work on the same document at the same time while seeing each other’s edits, and all images are available for the whole group. No emailing files back and forth, just look in the folder.

• Choose which cloud-based system your team prefers.

How to use Google Drive for your website content

Why not just email?

Emailing files gets unmanageable very quickly, especially when emails carry the same file names with updates. After a few of those, it’s very hard to track what you’ve sent or left out. Often we forget what was sent, so we send it again. How many times have we received an email with images, only to get the same email a week later (“not sure if I sent these?”) with the same images? We’re not sure they’re the same, so we save them, and later find they were duplicates. How do we collaborate?

• Assign each team member specific sections and pages.

Why not track changes in Word?

Working with Word files and Dropbox is not as easy to set up as Google Drive and Google Docs, and emailing Word files does not guarantee everyone’s changes carry over. Imagine more than one team leader working on the same document: each editor makes their own edits to a single Word file, some overlapping the others’. They all send their edited copy back to you. Which document do you use? Which edit wins? With one “live” document in the cloud, edits are instant, live, and always current. There is only one.

• Google Docs has comments, change history, spell check, and more.

Break it down

• Select your best communicators as your collaboration team.
• Choose which cloud-based system your team prefers.
• Decide who is responsible for which sections and pages.

Recommended tools: Google Drive · Dropbox · OneDrive · iCloud · Slack

Step 2: Gathering the content

So it’s always clear what goes where, keep it simple: name your files well and organize them in folders.

Where do we put everything?

Folders. Create a folder with the same name as the page, like “team” for example. For any project (a website, a brochure, a video) it’s important to stay on top of every piece of content. If your images and files aren’t organized, it’s confusing to know that “IMG20198632Anu7.JPG” is meant for the “Sarah’s Bio” section of the About Team page. Give each page its own folder. Here we’d name the folder “About” and place every image for that page inside it. And since we also want good SEO, we’d name the image “sarah-smith-cio-company-name.jpg” so it’s clear what it is.

• Organize on your local computer before uploading.

Can we embed images inside the document?

No. It’s familiar to drag images into a document so we know where you want them, but there are two reasons not to. One: we can’t reference that image. Websites load images from a source, with code (img src="the-image-name-here.png"), so it needs to be an image file, not something buried in a text document. Two: that image is probably too small (low resolution) in your document for us to use. The site needs to scale for many screen sizes. Learn more about image file formats.

• Place one or more images in a folder for that page.

Does each page need its text document in that folder too?

Yes. Usually there’s just one text document per page, a clear way to know what text belongs to it. For extra clarity, name it “about” so we know it’s for the About page, or “team” for the team page. Imagine every text document was just named “text”: good luck finding the right one among a dozen “text” files in Google Drive’s recent documents.

• If a page has very little information, consider adding a subscribe or signup form to it.

Break it down

• Organize all content into nested folders, one per page of the website.
• Place all of the images for a page inside its folder.
• Name your images to describe the image itself.

Recommended tools: File Formats · Site Outline

Step 3: Review, revise, and finalize

…before it goes into a website. Now that everything is in place, review the content and update it to stay current.

Why is it important to get this done first?

It saves time and money. Completing your content before it goes into the site saves a huge amount of time, frustration, and ultimately money. The sooner the content is done, the sooner you can get onto your site. And more importantly: how can we design and build a website if we don’t have the content?

• Measure twice, cut once. Get your foundation solid first.

Can we just do this after it’s in the website?

Technically, yes. But you don’t want to start a new website full of errors. Reviewing content in folders is far easier and quicker than clicking through a website to see what’s there. With all your content in front of you, you can easily see what’s included; if it’s not in the folders, it’s not going on the site. Editing text before it goes into the website is a straightforward, familiar environment. Make your text edits, include all the images, PDFs, and video you want, and your website guru will do the rest.

• WordPress has no built-in spell checker, so we use a dedicated grammar and spell-check tool.

What else should we check?

Updating and revising your images, photos, and graphics matters just as much before it goes into the website. Photos from current smartphones are about five times the resolution a website needs, so scaling them down is the smart move. Otherwise you build a bloated media library that makes backups and recovery slow and costly. Scale images down before you add them to your site.

• Ask about SEO, naming images, and adding ALT text.

Break it down

• Confirm that every page and all of its content is organized and included.
• Review all content for spelling, grammar, and accuracy.
• Clear all comments and resolve any internal issues with the content.

Recommended tools: Edit Images

Need some help?

• Schedule a tutorial, an in-office session on your website content.
• A new website, from a 30-year WordPress specialist.
• FAQs, answers to common questions.
• Get started: ready when you are.