How to prepare your website content (a practical guide for small businesses)

What slows down a website project the most is almost never design or development. It’s missing content: the “about” page text promised “for next week” a month ago, the photo still to be taken, the logo that only exists as a low-resolution file on an old business card.

Here’s what to gather before starting your project, so development can move forward without waiting on you.

Why preparing content changes everything

A developer can build a page structure without the final content, but can’t fill it in. As long as the text and visuals aren’t ready, the site stays a skeleton: the layout is done with placeholder text, proportions shift once the real content is added, and settings often need to be redone.

A project where content arrives from the start moves in order: structure, then styling, then launch. A project where content trickles in stretches over months, with follow-ups on both sides. The difference between the two almost never comes down to technical complexity — it comes down to what’s ready before starting.

The text: what to write for each page

You don’t need to be a writer. What matters is having your ideas laid out, page by page, so the developer doesn’t have to guess what you meant. I cover the pages themselves in my article on the essential pages of a business website — here’s what to prepare for each one:

Home: one sentence that says what you do and for whom, plainly, no jargon.
Services: for each service, the need it answers, how you handle it, and what the client gets.
About: your background in a few lines, what led you to this work, what sets you apart.
Contact: nothing to write here, but your exact details need to be checked before sending.

A good trick: say these texts out loud, as if explaining your work to a client on the phone, then write them down. The result always sounds more natural than text written to “sound written.”

Photos: quality over quantity

Visuals are often the hardest thing to gather, and yet they’re what gives the site its credibility — or its amateurishness.

A few simple guidelines:

Real photos rather than stock images, whenever possible. A real photo of your workshop, your team, or your work builds more trust than a generic image found on ten other sites.
Good resolution: avoid photos taken at low quality or already compressed by messaging apps. A photo that’s too small or pixelated immediately hurts how the site is perceived.
A consistent look: a handful of photos in the same style beats a mix of formats and moods.
For the homepage, one strong image is often enough — no need to multiply variants.

If you don’t have usable photos yet, plan a session with your phone in daylight, near a window: natural light solves half of all quality issues.

The logo: the right format avoids a lot of rework

The logo often runs into a simple problem: it only exists in a format unsuited to the web. A low-resolution JPEG pulled from an old invoice doesn’t scale up cleanly and turns pixelated on screen.

What’s ideally needed:

A vector file (SVG, AI, EPS) that scales to any size without losing quality.
A transparent-background version (PNG or SVG), useful for placing it on a colored background.
If possible, a light variant and a dark variant, to fit the site’s different backgrounds.

If you don’t have any of these formats — or no logo at all — just say so upfront. It’s a point to plan for rather than discover at integration time, since it can require a quick logo refresh before it’s usable on the site.

The practical details not to forget

These are the small things that make a site actually work, often gathered last even though they take five minutes to put together:

Full contact details: phone, email, address if you welcome the public.
Opening hours, if relevant.
Links to your active social profiles (no need to list the ones you no longer maintain).
Legal information: business structure, registration number, needed for the legal notices.
A few existing client reviews, if you have any — they carry more weight than any self-written text.

The checklist before you start

A project that starts with this list already gathered often saves several weeks on the schedule:

Text for each page (home, services, about).
Five to ten real photos, at good resolution.
The logo as a vector file, or an agreement to redo one.
Up-to-date contact details, hours, and legal notices.
A few existing client reviews, if available.

None of this needs to be perfect. The goal isn’t a flawless content set before starting, but enough to work with — wording adjustments are easy to make once the site is live.

Let’s talk about your project

Don’t have all this content gathered yet? That’s not a problem to get started: I’ll point out what’s missing as we go, and some of it can be prepared in parallel with development.

Send me a message describing your project: we’ll look together at what’s already ready and what’s left to gather, before we even talk about a quote.