Designing the Page Before the Content Exists

The usual order

Design is agreed, the site is built, and the content is requested near the end.

Which happens because design is visible and exciting, content is slow and nobody's favourite job, and clients want to see something.

The result is a set of containers of fixed shape, into which the actual material has to be squeezed.

Every subsequent conversation is about making the words fit rather than about whether the page does its job.

What placeholder text hides

• Whether the argument works in the order the design presents it.
• Whether the sections are the right sections.
• Whether the real text is longer or shorter than the space.
• Whether the headings say anything.
• Whether there is enough to say to fill the page at all.

The last is the one that causes the most trouble. A design with six sections requires six things to say, and a business frequently has four.

The two remaining sections then get filled with something, which is where mission statements and stock photography come from.

A worked example

A project where the homepage design was approved with placeholder text in eight sections.

When the content was written, three of the sections had nothing genuine to hold.

The business filled them with a values statement, a stock image with a caption, and a testimonial repeated from another page.

None of those had been anybody's idea. They existed because the design had spaces in them.

Redesigning around five real sections would have produced a shorter and better page, and by that stage the design was signed off and the build was underway.

The site launched with three sections nobody wanted, which is an ordinary outcome of an ordinary process.

Content first, roughly

The alternative, and it does not require finished copy.

What is needed before design is the substance: what the page must say, in what order, roughly how much of each.

A bulleted outline is enough. Six lines saying this page needs to explain what the service is, what it costs, how long it takes, what the process is, two examples, and how to get in touch.

That takes an hour and it tells a designer what they are designing for.

The polished writing can follow, and the structure will not change underneath it.

Why it is resisted

Worth naming, because the resistance is real and not unreasonable.

Content is the slowest part of any website project and the part clients most often delay, so starting with it delays the visible progress.

A design shown early makes a project feel underway, which is worth something to everybody involved.

And writing about your own business is genuinely difficult, which is why it gets postponed rather than done.

None of that changes the outcome. Postponing content does not remove the work; it moves it to the point where changing anything is expensive.

What the outline reveals

The useful side effect, and it is frequently uncomfortable.

Writing out what each page must say exposes where a business does not know its own answer: what something costs, how long it takes, what makes it different.

Those gaps exist whether or not anybody writes them down, and the website is where a customer encounters them.

Finding them during an outline is cheap. Finding them mid-build is expensive, and finding them when a customer asks is worse than both.

Designing for a range instead

The pragmatic middle where content genuinely cannot come first.

If a design must be produced before the words exist, it should be built to accommodate a range rather than a specific length.

Sections that expand, cards that align regardless of title length, and headings that survive wrapping.

And the placeholder text should be realistic: roughly the length the real content will be, in the same language, rather than the standard Latin filler.

Using plausible English placeholder text reveals problems that Latin does not, because everybody reads it and notices when it does not make sense.

The counter-case

Where design can reasonably lead.

A template being built for content that does not exist yet and will arrive continuously, such as a blog or a product catalogue, where designing for a pattern is the whole point.

A visual identity exercise, which is about colour and type rather than about a specific page.

And a rebuild of a site whose content already exists and is being carried over, where the content is known even if it is not in the design tool.

That last case is the most common in small business work, and it is frequently treated as though the content were unknown when it is sitting on the current site.

The page nobody planned

A specific symptom of designing first, and a common one.

Sites acquire pages because a template offered one: a services overview that duplicates the individual service pages, a news section with three posts from the launch, a team page for a business of two.

Each exists because it was in the theme rather than because anybody decided it was needed.

Which produces a site with more pages than material, where several are thin and none is quite finished.

The remedy is deciding the page list from the content outline rather than from the template, and deleting anything that survives only because it came included.

Fewer, fuller pages outperform more, thinner ones on every measure that matters.

Who writes it

The question that decides whether any of this happens.

The business knows the material and frequently cannot write it. A writer can write it and does not know the material.

What works: the business talks and somebody else writes it down.

An hour of questions, recorded and then transcribed, produces more usable material than three weeks of waiting for somebody to sit down and compose something from nothing.

It is also considerably more accurate, because people explain their own work well out loud and badly in writing.

What to do

1. Outline each page before any design begins.
2. List what it must say, in order.
3. Note roughly how much of each.
4. Cut any section with nothing genuine to hold.
5. Use realistic placeholder text if the writing is not ready.
6. Record an interview if writing is the obstacle.

The fourth is the one that improves the site most and is hardest to do late, which is the entire argument for doing this at the beginning.

The layout consequences are covered in a layout that survives a long business name.

Frequently asked questions

West Coast Media Solutions Inc. provides web design, web development, hosting, digital marketing, and business consulting to organisations across Canada, drawing on more than twenty-five years in the field.