How to Organize & Create Website Content
Almost 7 years ago I bought the designingtherow.com domain name. My coding and design skills were ready to go, but when it came to figuring out what content to include on my own website... I remember feeling extremely lost. I made notes about websites of other businesses that I liked to try to help guide me. And even then, I changed my website all 👏🏼 the👏🏼 time!
Maybe you know that feeling too? Maybe that's you right now??
Well, during the past 7 years I've worked with over 200 website clients and have learned a few things about website content. I've even created my own process to help clients organize and create their own content. And today, I'm sharing that process in a tutorial video on YouTube.
On the surface, this process seems SO simple. Truth is, it took me quite awhile to not only hone in on the content creation/organization piece of the puzzle, but nail down how to *simplify* the process.
And now here we are - the 2023 version of the Designing the Row® content creation and organization process... my easy and exact steps so you can follow along:
A big question when starting a new website project is, "how do I organize and create website content?" Which is understandable! Content creation can feel very overwhelming, especially when you're wanting to put your best foot forward online! What to include? How to organize? Where to start? This video will cover it all!
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Rather read instead of watch? Here's the video tutorial transcript.
Here we are in Google Drive. For every project I create a Website folder. You can see I've titled this one “YouTube Video Website” as an example. Within that folder I create a couple other things. First up you see another folder for “Logo files.” So if you have an official logo, obviously this is where these files would go. If you have a brand guide PDF, this is where that would go. Font files. Anything related to your branding goes here. And then another folder for “Photos.” Any photos that you want on your website put into this folder. If you know exactly what photos you want on what page, you can either change the title, like the file title to reflect the page name, or you can put them in separate folders for each page. Or if you're working with me or even another designer and you want them to choose where photos go, just dump them all in your photos folder and let them know. That's for your visual assets.
What I really want to walk you through in this video is the “website content template” doc that I've got here. I'm going to go ahead and open that up. If you are working with me, I will have already created all of this, filled this out for you to get you started. And then it's your turn to fill in the actual content. If you've just come across this video on YouTube, this is pretty easy to recreate in Google Drive. You can see up at the top, I have a place for your Squarespace URL and the password to view the site as it's in trial so that's always easy to access at the very top. And then under that, I have a chart that we will put your website navigation. Again, for my clients, we will have already defined your navigation when you went through the proposal process. This will already be filled out for you. I'm just going to create an example here, home page about page. Let's say we're going to do a musician website: tour page, music page, videos and contact.
Then I would be able to just delete these two rows here. And we've got our pages here. The next column is the status of those pages or the content for those pages. If you click here on this dropdown, you can see I've got not started in progress and ready for a website. As you're creating your content, you can flip through these. Once you start creating content, say for your homepage, you can put that to “in progress.” That means you're working on it, but you're not totally done yet. When you are done and you are ready for me to take everything in this doc and put it on your website, obviously market “ready for website.” And then over here. The link, once I start designing your website, I will put links to each page here so you can click through quickly and see. It's pretty easy to click through the navigation once you're on the site, but just to have some organization up here at the top for each page and where we are with each one.
That is the chart here at the top. You can't design a site/create content for your site until you know what pages you want. Don't go any further with trying to create a website until you figure out your pages here, the order you want them and what you want to include. Once you've done that, we can come down here and you can see I've got a note that this doc is only meant for text copy and comments only because images can't be saved from Google Docs and also it just kind of gets messy if you start putting a whole bunch of pictures in here.
Next what I do is create little sections for each page. I'm going to type out the page titles and then I'm going to click insert horizontal line.
We've got all of our sections for our pages, now we are ready to start adding our content. So this is where you might say, this is why I'm watching this video because I don't know how to create and organize my content. I'm going to go through and quickly give you a few ideas and make a little checklist here to help guide you in organizing what you want to say on your website and how you're going to put it together.
Let's start here on the homepage. At the homepage, I usually like to get a checklist going here. Start off with a banner and image of sorts. Maybe this is just one image or a gallery of images, whatever you want, whatever you have. As a designer prefer full with image at the very top, which means it needs to be horizontal.
If you are like in this example, a musician, then you are the topic of your website. And so I would want a picture of you. The picture would need you obviously in it. We don't want you too close or too far away. We need some good white space around you though. And this is because when the picture is horizontal on desktop or a laptop, when you go to mobile, it's going to look more vertical. So we need some room for the image to move around and be responsive based on device size. Something that's not too far away that we can barely tell who you are and not so close up onto your face that if it crops, you're going to look really silly on mobile. And I prefer the first picture on the website that you are making eye contact with the camera. That is the very first thing you see.
Then after that, there are a wide variety of things that you could include on your homepage. A tagline would be good. One to two sentences here. You want to include important keywords. Some people come to me and they say, “I'm not ranking for X keyword on my website with SEO.” Like “you did it wrong.”
But if you don't include keywords in your page text, you are not going to rank for them. Google's not just going to randomly read your mind and decide, “Oh, this girl, she probably wants to rank for this. Let's rank her for this.” No, you have to include those keywords in your content. If there's anything like a location or certain type of music or your name that you want to rank for, you need to include that definitely on your homepage and definitely very prominently at the top of your website homepage. Okay. So a tagline. One to two sentences, what you're about and use keywords to describe this from here. Let's see.
If you were a musician, I would do a feature section. And for a musician, this would be your latest album. I would do the cover of your album, a short description of your album, the release state, pre-save or buy links, whatever stage you're at in the project. That would be the first section here, the cover, obviously the title of the album. That would be the next section I would include.
If you are a business or maybe an author or an event, this feature section needs to be your main call to action. Whatever action you want people to take on your website, you need to include it at the very top of your website right here on the home page so people can see it and take action on it. So whatever your main call to action is put here in this feature section.
After that we could go on to have some more images. If you did the full width one picture at the very top, I would recommend this being a gallery of images or vice versa. But let's do the gallery here. If we do the full width at the top, usually here I like to do a grid or a carousel of some sort to break it up so it's not just another full width picture. I'd recommend four photos here because that works well on desktop and mobile. And this could be really any type of photos that you want. I do recommend that all photos that you use on your website be on-brand and in the same color palette and scheme and photo shoot so that it all looks cohesive, especially on your home page.
Okay, after that, again, going on the musician theme here, I would probably put your tour dates. And I work in Squarespace, and Squarespace does have an events feature, but I don't like it for tour dates. I recommend using Bandsintown. Some clients like to use Seated. Bandsintown is the most popular though and integrates really well with Squarespace. If you have never heard of it or never used it, go to manager.bandsintown.com and you can add in your tour dates.
After that, let's see. You could do a testimonial or press quote section. This is obviously just like “so and so said this great anything about you and this is who they are or who they work for.” List those quotes here in the doc. If you want to include a photo or a logo to go with those, that would be great as well. But again, remember to put that in another folder, not in this actual document.
Another section you could include on your home page is what I like to call “secondary call to action” section. A lot of people say, “but I want my website to do more than just one thing. I want to sell merch and I want to sell my music and my tour dates and get people to watch my video and sign up for my e- mail list.” That's great. And it can do all of those things, but we need to feature one, make it the most important. Then down here in the secondary call to actions, you can call up all those other things or a couple of those other things. I usually recommend three. So this can be a merch preview, it could be a video preview, and get people to sign up for your YouTube channel. Whatever you want to put here, sometimes I even put people's contact information here. You could do kind of a discography preview here that leads to your music page. Basically take pages on your site and do a little preview of them here and lead them to the full page.
So in this section, you would have a title for each secondary call to action, a description. Images are optional, but visuals are great. And then you would also have a button to link to full page.
And last but not least, I guess we could do a couple more things. You do an email list sign up. If you don't already have an email list, MailChimp works great and integrates well with Squarespace. Squarespace again does have an email marketing built in, but it's not as robust. MailChimp, you can use very easily. It's a great way to get started. I do have a whole video comparing MailChimp, Squarespace, and ConvertKit. If you are interested in that, I will link that up here.
And Instagram feed. If you want to have your Instagram feed live on your homepage or even in your footer, so it's on every page, you can include that as well.
This is a pretty typical homepage lineup of content that I recommend. So take, take it as you will, organize it the way you want, take what's relevant to you and create your content for that. You can use this as the checklist. You just put all of your content and text for all of these. These sections are right here in this document in this home section.
Okay, moving on. That was probably going to be the most involved page of the website.
The About page is pretty simple here. Let's make another checklist. You're going to want a photo or photos. Those if you are, again, a musician, a photo of you is great or your band is great. If you are a business, you might want a section for “Meet the Team.” Well “Meet the Band,” whatever. So this could be individual team photos. You could have short bios. You could have links to each person's Instagram. Make it whatever you want. And then maybe this is obvious to you, maybe not, but an About page is actually (at least what I've seen in my research) the most viewed page on a website after the home page. So don't skip out on your About page. People really do want to know who you are before they trust you and, and buy whatever you're offering! They want to know who you are and can they trust you. Don't skip out on this page and write a good bio. Really let people get to know you. I can't tell you how many times people have come to me after reading my website and saying, “I loved your story about how you came to Nashville. You didn't know anybody and now you're doing this.” It really has the chance to resonate with people if you, if you let it.
The Tour page, for musicians, it can be very simple. A photo again, optional. Maybe on this one, you want to do a live photo to represent your tour. And then your tour dates via Bandsintown or whatever other app.
Music. This could look like several different things too. As we're in the middle of 2023, things are evolving with websites and everything is getting more and more simple. So whereas before I used to design Music pages that had like album covers, Spotify links, release dates, credits that I already just say description, album description, basically just a whole bunch of stuff about the album. Now, people are just doing the album cover and a smart link that links to, you know, the ones I'm talking about when you click on it and it gives you options to go to your music platform of choice. You could keep it very simple.
And I guess with this, you would want to include the title and maybe the release date. Simplifying is great for the user, but do remember for SEO that you do want to include text on your pages because that is how Google reads and you don't want to cut out every important element. You still do want to include some text copy on your website, especially if you're a musician on your Music page!
Moving on to the Videos page. For the banner of the video page, a lot of times I like to use a video instead of a photo. So let's say we'll start up here with a video feature. We'll do that full width across the screen. And for this, if you're going to do it as a banner type of video, a video without words or any kind of title overlay on it works best. And then for the video gallery, I don't want you to put every single video that you've ever done on your website, even though this is your portfolio of sorts. People are not going to sit there and watch all 20 or 30 of your videos. So give people your top six to eight videos. And if they want to watch more give them a button to YouTube so they can browse and subscribe on their own.
And last but not least, Contact page. You can have a feature image here if you want to keep it consistent, but you don't have to. And you can either have actual text content to share contact info. Or you could have a contact form or both. Sometimes I go to a website if I see the contact form. I just don't fill it out because I want to know the name and the email of the person that I'm reaching out to. So if it's just a contact form and it's not personalized at all, then sometimes I don't even read. I'm going to reach out. That said, I do like to have some kind of name or some kind of something to let people know who they're reaching out to.
That is how I would recommend you organize and create your content for your website. Obviously that was a musician example.
If you are a business, you could have a Services page. A Portfolio page.
And one more thing I'll add is that a lot of people say they “need to see something.” They want me to design something before they can write their content. And if that's the case, you need to go the template route. Just go buy a website template or start with one on a website builder and fill in the pieces. But if you were looking for a custom website, custom to you, meant to help you and your business grow, you need to learn and figure out how to write your content before you design it.
That is why I start here in a word doc or website project rather than actually designing because you need to figure out how to communicate through words and through organization before you start designing it. So write out your services, write out your bio. You do not need to see another website or an example of what your website could look like in order to do that. Get your message across through words and then let the designer put that into a pretty design. Okay, I hope this was helpful.
If you have any questions let me know in the comments and if you were interested in working with me and going through this process one on one together, definitely head to designingtherow.com and get started. Let's have a chat and talk about your website. Look forward to it. I'll see you in the next one.
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