How To Organize and Prepare Website Content

Learn why it’s important to prepare website content before you add it to your website, and how to get that done.

Sure, WordPress will let you update your website content easily; edit text, replace images, update links. But if you wait to edit this content until after it’s in your site, the end result will suffer.

This first phase to prepare website content and getting it ready properly will save you and your team a lot of time and avoid headaches. With your content ready, the site will launch on schedule and ready to bring in new business.

Why Do You Need This?

The pros and cons for completing the content before or after we create the website.

PROS

What happens when we complete site content before design?

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									see all of your content in one place

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									get a big picture of content

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									find out if we need more or less content

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									get this part done quicker

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									we'll all be happier

CONS

What happens when we review content after the design?

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									loose track of what content we have

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									waste time doing redundant tasks

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									pages will look inconsistent

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									takes more time to edit after the site launches

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									headaches, frustration, confusion

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									additional time = additional costs

Here are 3 Top Tips for Content Management: Collaborate, Organize, and Review

Let’s Get Started With Managing Your Website Content:

								This page is best viewed using a larger screen. Organizing files, folders, etc is very difficult on a mobile device. Please visit this page using your computer or iPad in landscape mode.

STEP 1: Team Collaboration

Why We Need To

Collaborate.

								To make sure you can efficiently manage your website content in a team of two or more, working together is an important part of any project’s success. Let’s get on the same page (pun intended) so we know what we are working on.

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									What are we collaborating?

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									How do we collaborate?

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									Why Not…?

What are we collaborating?

								**The content for your project:**  Text, images, links to videos, etc. Whether this project is a brochure, a website, or an email newsletter, communicating with a team on what text to use, what images to include, and what links to where is vitally important before it is added to the project. My [Website Process](https://medwelldigital.com/website-process/) is a linear progress-oriented approach which helps to stay on track and get things done.

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									select your best communicators as your collaboration team

How do we collaborate?

								**There are several options for Document Collaboration:** The best way to keep the content organized, accessible, and up-to-date it to **use a cloud-based service**, like [Google Drive](https://www.google.com/drive/), [DropBox](https://www.dropbox.com/), or [ iCloud](https://www.icloud.com). These shared-environments and tools offer cloud-based document editing, allowing for multiple team editors to work on the same document at the same time while seeing each other’s edits. And all images are available for all group members to see. No need to email files back and forth, just look in the folder.

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									choose which cloud-based system your team prefers

				[

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								How To Use Google Drive for Your Website Content

				](https://medwelldigital.com/using-google-drive-for-your-website-content/)

Why not

just email the content?

								**Emailing files can get unmanageable very quickly,** especially when emails can contain the same file names with updates. After a few emails like this, it’s very difficult to track what you’ve sent or omitted. Often we forget what was sent… so we’ll send it again. How many times have we all received an email with images, only to get the same email a week later “not sure if I sent these?” with the same images. Well, we are not sure if they are the same so we have to save them. But later we find they are duplicates. How *do* we collaborate?

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									assign each team member specific section/pages

Why not track

changes in Word?

								Working with Word files and DropBox is not as easy to set up as Google Drive and Google Docs. And emailing Word files does not guarantee other’s changes will carry over to your documents.

Imagine that more than one team leader is working on the same document/page. Each editor makes their own edits to a single Word file, and some overlap the others’ edits. All of these editors send back their individual edited document to you.

How do we know which document to use, which edit to favor, etc? This can be avoided using a collaborative approach. With one “live” document in the cloud, edits are instant, live, and always updated; this simplifies and clarifies which document to use. There is only one.

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									Google Docs has comments, change history, spell check, etc.

Break It Down:

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									Select your best communicators  as your collaboration team

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									Choose which cloud-based system your team prefers

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									Discuss with your team who is responsible for which section/pages

Recomended Tools/Resources

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								Google Drive

				](https://cloud.google.com/drive-enterprise/)

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								DropBox

				](https://help.dropbox.com/files-folders/share/edit-microsoft-office-documents)

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								iCloud

				](https://support.apple.com/en-us/HT206181)

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								Slack

				](#elementor-action%3Aaction%3Dlightbox%26settings%3DeyJ0eXBlIjoidmlkZW8iLCJ2aWRlb1R5cGUiOiJ5b3V0dWJlIiwidXJsIjoiaHR0cHM6XC9cL3d3dy55b3V0dWJlLmNvbVwvZW1iZWRcLzZjN19UcFBVcEwwP2ZlYXR1cmU9b2VtYmVkIn0%3D)

STEP 2: Gathering The Content

Organize

Your Content.

								So that it’s clear what goes where… **K**eep **I**t **S**imple, **S**arah… Name your files and organize them in folders. 

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									Where do put everything?

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									Can We Embed?

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									What Goes Where

Where do we put everything?

								**Folders. **Create a folder with the same name as the page, like “team” for example. For any project (like a website, brochure, video) it’s extremely important to stay on top of all of the content.

If your images and files are not organized, it will be very confusing to know that “IMG20198632Anu7.JPG” is for the “Sarah’s Bio” section of the About Team page. In order to know which image belongs to which page, create a single folder for each page.

For this example, we will name this folder “About” and place all images we want for this page in this folder. Since we also want good SEO (read more on that here), we want to name the image “sarah-smith-cio-company-name.jpg” which will be very clear what this is.

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									organize on your local computer before uploading

Can we embed images inside the document?

								**No**. Although it’s familiar to drag your images into a document so that we know where you want them, there are 2 reasons why we don’t want to do this. **ONE*** – * We can’t refer to that image. Websites require images to load from a source.

This means we have to load that image with code (img src=”the-image-name-here.png”) and that means it needs to be an image, and not a text document. TWO* – *That image is probably too small (low resolution) in your document for us to use. We need to make the site scalable for multiple screen sizes. Learn more about image file formats.

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									place one or more images in a folder for that page

Does each page need the text document to be in that folder?

								**Yes**! Usually we have only 1 text document for each page. This is a clear way to know what text belongs just to that page. For extra clarity, name that page “about” so we know it’s for the about page, or “team” for the team page. Just imagine if all of our text documents were named “text” – that would be difficult to locate it if we were in “recent documents” on Google Drive with dozens of “text” files.

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									if your page has very little information, consider adding a subscribe or signup form onto the page

Break It Down:

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									Organize all content into nested folders for each page of the website.

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									Place all of the images for that page inside each folder

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									Name your images to relate to the image itself

Recomended Tools/Resources

				[

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								File Formats

				](https://medwelldigital.com/file-formats-demystified/)

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								Site Outline

				](https://medwelldigital.com/what-is-information-architecture/)

STEP 3: Review, Revise, and Finalize

Review

Your Content

								…*before* It Goes Into a Website. Now that everything is in place, review the contents and update to stay current.

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									Why Is This Important Now?

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									Can We Do This After?

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									What Else?

Why is it important to get this done first?

								**Saves time and money. **Getting your content completed before we put it in your website will save a huge amount of time, frustration, and ultimately, money. The sooner we get this content completed, the quicker you can get in on your site. Also… and more importantly, how can we design and build a website if we don’t have the content?

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									measure twice, cut once… get your foundation solid first.

Can we just do this after you put it into the website?

								Technically, Yes. But you don’t want to start your new website with errors do you? Reviewing what content you have in folders is a lot **easier and quicker** than navigating a website to see what content has been provided.

With all of your content now in front of you, you can easily see what will be included… if it’s not in the folders, it’s not going to be added to the site. Updating the text before it goes into the website is a straight-forward and more familiar environment.

Simply make the text edits to the pages, include all of the images, PDFs, and video you want for your site pages. Your website guru will do the rest!

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									WordPress does not have a spell checker built in. I currently use [Grammarly](https://www.grammarly.com) and it's brilliant.

What else should we check to complete the website content?

								Updating and revising your images, photos, and graphics is equally important before it goes into the website. Photos we take with our current smartphones are about 5 times the resolution needed for a website.

Scaling these images down will be the smartest choice. Otherwise,  you will build a bloated media library which makes backups and recovery a long and costly process; therefore its better to get these scaled down before you add them to your site.

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									ask about SEO and naming images and adding ALT info.

Break It Down:

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									Confirm that all of the pages and content are organized and included

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									Review all of the content for spelling, grammar, and accuracy

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									Clear ALL comments and resolve all internal issues with the content

Recomended Tools/Resources

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								Edit Images

				](https://medwelldigital.com/5-top-tools-and-apps-to-use-to-edit-images-on-wordpress-websites/)

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								Grammarly

				](https://www.grammarly.com)