Designing With the Content Written First

Why it does not happen

Everybody agrees content should come first and the order is almost always the other way round.

A design can be shown to somebody, discussed, and approved, which feels like progress.

Writing cannot be shown until it is done, is nobody's favourite task, and belongs to whoever is busiest.

So the layout gets approved, and the words are then written to fit boxes somebody else drew.

What that costs

• Text cut to fit a space.
• Sections invented because the layout has room.
• Headings padded to a similar length.
• Placeholder text hiding real problems.
• The important point in a small box.

The second is the most expensive. A layout with six equal panels produces six equal points, whether the business has six or two, and the two real ones are diluted by four invented to fill the shape.

Three pages is enough to start

Since writing an entire site before designing is the version that never happens.

Write the home page, your most important service page, and the contact page, properly, in real words.

That is enough for a designer to see how much text there actually is, where the emphasis falls, and what shape the pages want to be.

The rest can follow the pattern those three establish.

Three pages is a morning's work for somebody who knows the business, which is considerably less than the fortnight people imagine.

And it is the same morning that would otherwise be spent later, cutting text to fit.

Write it as answers, not as copy

The technique that makes the writing possible for people who do not write.

Rather than writing a page, answer the questions a customer asks: what is it, what does it cost, how long, what goes wrong, what do I do next.

Write each answer as you would say it, in a few sentences.

That produces the raw material, and the raw material can be arranged afterwards.

Almost everybody who says they cannot write a service page can answer eight questions about their own work.

Dictating the answers works too, and produces something closer to how the business actually speaks.

A worked example

A business approved a design containing a row of four benefit panels with an icon and thirty words each.

When the words came to be written they had two genuine benefits and had to invent two more.

The invented ones were generic, which made all four look generic, and the page said less than the two would have alone.

On the rebuild they wrote the answers first, which produced two strong points and a long explanation of the process.

The design that followed had two panels and a longer section, which matched what the business actually had to say.

That page produced more enquiries than the four-panel version had.

What the writing reveals

Which is the argument for doing it first beyond the layout question.

You find out what you cannot answer, which is usually a price or a timescale.

You find out where two services are really one, or where one is really two.

You find out which page has nothing to say, which is a page that should not exist.

And you find out what order the questions come in, which is the page structure arriving on its own.

None of that surfaces while somebody is arranging rectangles.

Give the designer the real text

Since placeholder text conceals every problem this is meant to prevent.

Latin filler makes every block look the same length and every heading look balanced, which is exactly the illusion to avoid.

Real text is uneven: one section is long, one heading is six words and another is two, and one answer needs a table.

A design built against that unevenness works when it goes live, and one built against filler has to be fought with afterwards.

Where some text genuinely is not ready, use a grey box saying what will go there rather than filler that looks finished.

Expect the design to change the writing back

Since this is not a one-way process.

A designer will find that a section works better as a list, that two paragraphs should be one, or that a point deserves more room.

That is a good outcome and it is a conversation about the content rather than a constraint imposed on it.

Plan for a second pass on the words after the first layout, which is quick because the substance already exists.

What you are avoiding is not iteration, it is the situation where the shape was fixed before anybody knew what went in it.

Whoever writes it should not be whoever approves it

A practical point about getting it done at all.

The person who knows the answers is usually the owner, and the owner is also the person approving the site, which produces a stall: writing feels like a task that can wait and approving feels urgent.

Separate them by having somebody interview the owner rather than asking them to write, which converts an hour of dreaded writing into an hour of talking about their own work.

The interviewer then drafts and the owner corrects, which is a far easier task than starting.

That works whether the interviewer is a colleague, a supplier, or somebody writing for you, and it is the reason interviewed content exists at all.

The counter-case

Strict content-first can stall a project entirely.

A business that cannot get the writing done blocks everything, and months pass with nothing to show, which is worse than a compromise.

Some clients also genuinely need to see something before they can think, and an early rough layout unlocks the writing rather than constraining it.

And for a small site on a known template, the shape is already decided and the argument matters less.

Write three pages as answers to questions, hand over real text, and expect a second pass afterwards.

What to do

1. Choose three pages to write first.
2. List the questions each answers.
3. Answer them as you would say them.
4. Note what you cannot answer.
5. Hand over real text, not filler.
6. Use grey boxes for genuine gaps.
7. Plan a second pass after the layout.

Step three is what makes this achievable, since almost everybody who cannot write a page can answer eight questions about their own work.

What happens without it is covered in designing the page before the content exists.

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.