How to Prepare Website Content Before Hiring a Web Designer (2025 Guide)

You’ve found a web designer you want to work with, but they can’t start because… you’re still hunting for photos, finalising your About page, and deciding on your brand colours. This first phase of the project is critical, and clients often underestimate how much it affects the design process. Many people think the designer will handle the content, but this leads to delays from back-and-forth revisions, increased costs, and a site that doesn’t truly reflect your brand. Having your content ready means the designer can work efficiently, focusing their energy on creative solutions instead of chasing missing pieces.

(By the way, have you checked out our article on how to know if it’s time to do a website redesign?)

Plus, the content itself will guide the designer in determining the layout, content hierarchy and visuals – and to create a product that will help visitors become customers. By contrast, it’s harder to work with filler content. Content informs design.

What is your website’s core purpose? Maybe these questions will help you answer this:

• Target audience: Who are you speaking to? What problems do you solve for them? For example, perhaps you offer bespoke decor solutions for homeowners.
• Measurable goals: What do you want your website to achieve for your business? For example, you could generate leads (collect people’s contact information, with their consent), sell products, do online bookings for events that you host, share your portfolio of projects, etc.
• Core message: What’s one thing that you want visitors to your website to understand about your brand? This could be your mission statement or brand positioning statement.

Once you're clear on these fundamentals, you can tackle the actual content creation with confidence.

For each of the key pages on your website, prepare your written content. In doing so, consider your brand voice: is it professional, casual, playful, or authoritative? You could use a brand personality test to figure this out, if you haven’t already.

Here are some pages that are essential on most websites:

• Home: This is typically the first page that visitors will land on, so the content here is really important. First impressions matter, and if they’re good, they’ll lead visitors from this page to other parts of your site, for them to take action sooner rather than later (e.g. buy, sign up, book, etc.). Write a clear, concise summary of who you are and what you do. This page will have several sections that are concise versions of other key pages, offering the visitor an overview of your website.
• About: Visitors usually want to know about the people behind the scenes: this is your opportunity to build trust. Here’s where you share your story, what your business does, its ethos and values, and if you have key team members, introduce them here.
• Products (if applicable): If you have an online shop, this is the main page for that. Introduce your product range, and for each of your products, list detailed descriptions, pricing and benefits.
• Services (if applicable): If you have service offerings, detail what those are, what they cost, and what the benefits are to your customers.
• FAQ: Make it super easy for potential customers to take action by anticipating any questions they might have, so that they don’t have to go through the effort of contacting you for that information.
• Contact: This page will have a contact form, but it should also include your business email address, mobile number (if applicable), hours of operation, and location or address details (if applicable). Be sure to include your social media links here (e.g. LinkedIn, Instagram, YouTube).
• Blog articles (if applicable): Get a head start on your website’s content and SEO by preparing a few blog posts ahead of the website build.

In general, it’s better (for good user experience) to use clear headings, keep paragraphs short, and highlight benefits over features (think about what your customers want). Finally, best to get your copy proofread before sending it to the designer – quality writing signals professionalism, while typos can turn visitors away.

Here’s where your brand starts coming to life online! Visual elements are key: you’ll be working with some unconscious processes to create trust and generate feelings (of excitement, urgency, calm, etc.) in your potential clients that will prompt them to take the actions you want.

Here’s what to include:

• Logo files: Supply your logos in high-resolution SVG or PNG files, for the designer to resize as needed.
• Brand colours: If you already have brand colours, supply those as hex or RGB codes (for digital use).
• Photography: Use high-resolution images of your own, preferably professionally shot – avoid stock photos if you can, and make sure you have the rights to use all the images. Photos are typically needed for hero sections, backgrounds, headshots (on the About page), products, etc.
• Graphics and icons (optional): Gather any custom graphics, illustrations or icons that you want on your website.
• Typography (optional): If you have brand fonts, the designer will check if they are available digitally and web-safe. If not, they’ll find a similar or suitable alternative.
• Brand collateral (optional): If you have any style guides, brand guidelines, or marketing material that you’ve used lately, this will be extra helpful for your designer.

You’re halfway there!

For visitors to your website to “convert” (i.e. to take the action you want them to take, like purchasing a product or booking your service), you’ll want to build trust. Here’s where “social proof” is invaluable.

• Client testimonials: Ask past clients to review you on Google if they’re happy with your product or service – then your designer will copy those over to your website.
• Case studies or portfolio: If you already have completed projects to showcase, write a blurb about each of them and accompany them with a photo. Proof that you’ve done great work already.
• Awards or certifications: If you have these, include a visual (such as a logo of the award or a photo of you receiving it).
• Press mentions or features: If you’ve been mentioned in the press, an image (photo or screen grab) of the article is great social proof.
• Before/after examples (if applicable): If you’re in the service industry, before & after photos can be great content for your site.

Your designer will work these elements of social proof into your website as they see fit.

Tip: Set a 20-minute timer and email three past clients for testimonials today.

Now for some technical information that your designer will require to set up your site:

Must-Haves:

• Platform: Do you know which platform you want your site to be built on, such as WordPress, Shopify or Squarespace? If so, check that your designer is comfortable with that platform. Also, be sure that you know upfront about the pros and cons of the different platform options, including the costs involved (e.g. ongoing subscriptions, plugin and theme renewals, etc.).
• Domain name: If you’ve already registered a domain, what is it? If you haven’t yet registered one, what’s your preferred domain, and do you have second & third choices in case the first isn’t available?
• Hosting: If you don’t already have a hosting package, you’ll want to choose a hosting provider (and package) that suits your website’s needs. This depends on your physical location and that of your website visitors, how much traffic you expect to your site, and how big your site will be. Most entry-level hosting packages with reputable companies are perfectly fine.
• Email address: For administration and billing (probably not the same as your public-facing contact email).
• Sitemap: A simple list of the pages you want on your site. This could also be a diagram.

Nice-To-Haves:

• Navigation: Do you know how you want users to move around your site? If so, it’ll be helpful to your designer if you sketch that.
• Analytics: If you’re already using Google Analytics, you’ll want to supply the tracking code. Otherwise, that can be set up and transferred to you.
• Other third-party integrations: For example, will you use an email marketing platform, or something else that should be integrated with your site’s functionality? Be sure to tell your web designer upfront.
• Inspiration: If you have some examples of websites that you admire for their layout, design or functionality, save those links to share with your designer.

Now that you’ve got all your content, it’s time to make it easily usable by your designer. We recommend setting up a shared folder (for example, a Google Drive) with subfolders by type, for brand assets, page text, images, and inspiration. Be sure to use descriptive filenames (especially for photos) so that your designer knows what goes where.

Tip: Write your copy in a shared doc so it’s easy for your designer to comment and edit.

Before sharing with the designer, do a final check:

1. Review your text for consistency in tone.
2. Check all facts and details.
3. Ensure that contact information and social media handles are correct.
4. Verify that you have the rights to use all images in the folder.
5. Proofread everything twice.
6. Lean on AI tools (like Gemini, Claude, or ChatGPT) for proofreading, generating alternative headlines, or even helping you articulate your value proposition more clearly.

Finally, keep a backup copy of this shared folder – just in case!

Now, before you get stuck in… just a note that there are some things that you should not need to worry about, because the designer will take care of this:

• Non-essential pages: As long as you have the key pages, more pages can be added later.
• Perfect text formatting: The designer will handle layout.
• Exact word counts: If you have sufficient content, it will probably be adjusted anyway.
• Technical SEO details: Just focus on clear content that’s helpful to your audience – this will naturally build good SEO anyway. If basic SEO is included in your website build package, the designer will choose appropriate keywords, meta descriptions and heading tags.

These are things your designer will handle, so that you can focus on creating clear, authentic content that only you can provide.

Also, keep a collaborative mindset with your designer and leave room for creative input: they’ll probably help you refine your messaging, and they might offer content suggestions during the design process. Trust the design process, and stay engaged: the more responsive you are to content questions and clarifications, the more smoothly the project will go.

By putting in this preparation work, you're not just making the designer's job easier: you're investing in a website that truly reflects your brand and works for your business from day one.  And remember, it doesn’t need to be perfect – just get started.