From attracting your next customer through SEO to offering a compelling portrait of all your B2B firm has to offer, content is key to an effective website.
And yet, when it’s time to plan a redesign, content too often is seen as an afterthought. Content is critical to any successful marketing plan, but it also supports every aspect of your website. Content includes text, data, images, audio, and any component that makes up your site’s user experience. If you fail to consider how your content fits into a new design, you’re placing your project at risk of encountering a costly 11th-hour scramble before launch.
Content should be part of the design conversation from the start to ensure a successful website project. When you’re working with the right web design agency, you’ll understand how your content will fit on a new site and what needs to happen to keep it current. More importantly, you’ll avoid surprises when you’re working to redesign the website your firm needs to be competitive.
Any website project requires generating a full view of your business before making decisions about your next website. All design projects begin with a discovery phase, which allows your web design agency to dig into where your firm currently stands and where it needs to go in the marketplace.
At Clear Digital, we conduct a Velocity Workshop during discovery to align every stakeholder of your project as well as technical and design workshops that break down your firm’s needs. To prevent a critical piece of the redesign puzzle from being overlooked, we conduct a content workshop as well.
Content workshops aim to build an overview of how your firm can expect to work on keeping its content up-to-date. The workshop covers what content needs to be updated, what should be retained, and what needs to be created to build a satisfying experience. We break down the content workshop into two parts:
The content of your redesigned site is inevitably informed by the content your firm has in place. Below are a few questions you should be prepared to address. Even if you can’t find all the answers in the workshop, these topics provide food for thought about your content needs.
If your firm plans to keep any existing content, your web agency needs to establish a migration plan for the project’s development requirements. You should list whatever blog items, videos, case studies, gated assets, or other content types you would like to carry over to the new design. Understanding what needs to migrate will help you and your web agency set priorities for migrating your existing content.
We also need to plan whether the migration will be conducted manually or through an automated script. You should track any unpublished items in your CMS that should be retained along with any new content that’s still to come. If an outside partner creates your content, you should outline who owns it and when it will be published.
If your current site serves a multilingual audience, your web agency should know the language requirements and how they will move to the new site. You should also share whether your firm uses third-party translation tools and how those can be incorporated into your redesign.
Your firm’s use of localization also needs to be incorporated into your content plan as well as how your content shifts to accommodate different markets. Any changes that impact your current or redesigned sitemap should also be discussed with your web agency.
Any brand guidelines your firm has developed should also be covered in the content workshop. You should discuss if your firm has established guidelines for messaging or its overall voice and tone. Is your firm still satisfied with those approaches? Or is a redesign the right time to consider a change?
Consider whether your current site also features a clear customer journey. If we are creating wireframes for your project, we will go over how to refine this journey later during the wireframe process.
Depending on your B2B firm’s needs, Clear Digital can assist with content writing and copywriting or identify areas that will require input from your team. If you’re working with us to provide writing services, you should discuss what needs to be adjusted along with any existing content that can be retained or provide a starting point for later refinement.
If any content updates can be resolved by consulting stakeholders from your marketing, product, or engineering teams, you should share their contact information during this workshop. The faster we can start working on filling the gaps in your site’s content the less likely you are to encounter delays in your schedule.
Any new or existing content you plan to provide for the redesign should first be verified by your internal team. Grammatical mistakes, incorrectly sized images, and other errors should all be resolved before sharing with your web agency for development. Ultimately, you may not know all of the gaps in your current content until these tactical considerations begin. When you’re working with the right design partner, you’ll be able to identify what’s correct, what needs improvement, and what is missing.
The second stage of the workshop clarifies how your web design partner will work with your firm’s content. As part of onboarding your team to the design project, we outline the details of the process, including content delivery templates, schedules, and best practices to ensure a successful collaboration.
Templates that conform to your redesigned site’s wireframes provide a delivery method for your firm’s content. At Clear Digital, we’ve used tools such as GatherContent and Content Snare to import content to your newly designed site, but we will adjust to any tools that suit your team.
The educational component of the workshop breaks down the terminology and tools that will be part of our partnership. Regardless of how experienced you or your team are with redesigns, we want to ensure every stakeholder is clear about the details of the process.
We use this part of the workshop to break down how your wireframes relate to your content. We identify and define design elements that might be used in your firm’s page designs. For example, the area between the navigation and the start of each page’s content is also known as a hero banner. We will discuss how elements like hero banners might be used differently from page to page and determine if placeholder content is needed during wireframe development. If placeholder content is needed during wireframe development, it will conform to your design’s requirements.
This section of the workshop outlines when your firm can begin providing content for the new site along with the workflow for revisions, approval, and QA. Once the content is exported, we’ll assess whether it needs further review to migrate to your new site.
Understanding best practices for managing content is a key educational component of our workshop. Following best practices is critical to managing the schedule. Delays in content delivery have a ripple effect, which will impact the final launch date.
Finally, two weeks prior to launch, we institute a content freeze that prohibits making changes to your old site’s content. Managing and preventing inconsistencies between the two sites is one of the more challenging aspects of the process.
Given that content plays such a crucial role in your website and its capabilities, we conduct our content workshops to ensure you and your stakeholders fully understand how it will be incorporated into your redesign. By breaking down the full extent of your site’s content and the amount of time required for its migration and creation, we aim to eliminate costly surprises for your stakeholders.
Content should be part of the design conversation from the start to ensure a successful website project.
Managing your content through a redesign requires a lot of work and shared responsibilities. But if you’re working with the right partner in a productive, efficient way, the process gets that much easier. If you want to make sure all your content remains covered in your next website project, we should get started.
Clear Digital has been awarded 12 ADDYs by the American Advertising Federation of Silicon Valley, showcasing excellence in digital marketing and design across B2B sectors.
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