How to prepare content for a WordPress site

Most websites are all about the content – there’s information of some kind to be communicated – that’s the reason for the website! It might be ‘buy our products’, ‘hire our services’ or ‘this is important public information’, but whatever the message, most websites are there to communicate content effectively.

In a typical WordPress project, Angry Creative can offer planning, design and development services, but we wouldn’t create all the content from scratch too – to do so would mean that we knew your business and objectives as well as you do (which is unlikely!). So at some point there needs to be a handover of content from you (the client) to us so that we can upload it to the site.

What content do you need?

The first step is to get a sitemap together that outlines the pages and sections that your website will include. If you don’t have one yet, see here to find out how to do that or contact us and we’ll talk you through the process. That sitemap will tell you what content you need, but it might well include:

• Text content
• Images and photos
• Other types of content like video, podcasts, tweets or embeds from ISSUU or SoundCloud

Why’s it important to hand over content in the right way?

Usually, we only upload enough content to demonstrate all the designs, templates and functionality required. We can use holding content for that, but if you give us your content to use, the site’ll be that much closer to going live when you first see it. Preparing content in the right way shouldn’t take you any longer than any other way, but it saves us a lot of time that we can then spend to better advantage on your project. So what is the right way to hand over content?

Text

Any text content you send us should be easy to copy and paste from. Word processing software like Word, Google Docs or Apple’s iWork are all good tools to use here – then you can add headings, bold/italic emphasis, links and pictures to the text to show us how you intend the page to look. Note that if you include images in documents, you’ll also need to supply us with a separate file for each image (as below).

Photographs and images

You should supply graphic files (like logos) in an editable, vector digital format. You should supply photographs in a high resolution digital format. If you choose to buy stock photographs, we can suggest stock libraries. If you’d like us to search for photographs for you, we can estimate for that.

Video

If you want video on your site, we’d strongly recommend hosting it on YouTube, Vimeo or Wistia and then embedding it on your WordPress site: it’s generally a much better experience for you and your users. You’ll need to upload your videos and send over the links to us so that we can include them. If they’re private videos we’ll either need embed instructions or your account login details too.

Existing site content

If all your content is on another website, or indeed a WordPress site, that’s even better – just point us to the site! If your current site is already in WordPress, we’ll generally ask for a database dump so that we can import the content exactly as it is. Do let us know if that’s the case – it can save days of work!

Do I need to get all the content 100% finalised before you can start?

If you’ve got 100%-polished and ready-to-go content, that’s perfect! If not, just get things as far along as you can. We’ll upload whatever content you send and fill in the gaps with holding copy. Once the staging site is made available to you, you’ll be able to edit and finalise the site’s content directly within the site.

How should I actually get it to you?

The best way we’ve found to structure the content is to create a folder hierarchy that matches your sitemap, and to add documents, images and instructions within each folder. Then, add it all to a ZIP file and send it by Dropbox, Google docs, email or WeTransfer (or another bulk file transfer service).

If you’ve got any better ideas, do let us know – as long as it’s clear and easy to work out what’s what, and to transfer it

If you’re planning a WordPress website redesign, it’s important to prepare your customers for the changes. Check out our guide on How to Prepare Your Customers for a WordPress Website Redesign for tips on managing expectations and ensuring a smooth transition.

Summary

In this article, we’ve looked at what sort of content makes up a typical website and how to prepare and hand it over to Angry Creative in the most efficient way. That lets us spend less time fathoming through Excel spreadsheets and asking you questions, and more time creating an amazing website for you!