What does content-first mean?

We are a content-first agency, and here’s why.

Content is the most essential part of any website, and that’s why we start with your content before we get into design, building or anything else.

However, writing content for your website can often be difficult, especially if you are unsure where to start or how you should structure each page, but we can help with that.

Why is supplying content content first important?

  • Your site content gets you found in searches and brings you new traffic.
  • Once on your site, reading great content converts the visitor into a lead.
  • Leads bring you new business.

Planning a content-first site means that:

  1. All your content is the priority, not simply something to flow into a design.
  2. Less tangible aspects of your content, such as URL structures, image file names and site structure, are adequately addressed.
  3. The appropriate time is taken to write the content to ensure it is as good as possible.
  4. The creative stages are designed around your content rather than writing content to fit a design.
  5. The whole site-building process takes far less time, as the development and content teams have everything they need to get the job done.

Design only gets you 300 milliseconds.

Many people often get disappointed when things don’t last long, but when it comes to your website, your site design gets you one-third of a second of consideration.

That’s how long a visitor takes to decide whether your site looks trustworthy.

Within that time, they make the following decisions:

  1. Does this site look appropriate?
  2. Does this site look professional?
  3. Does it look like this site will answer my question?

The user, not your brand team, decides the above. So, while design is important, it only covers the initial 300ms of interaction; after that, it’s down to what you have to say.

We encourage our clients to focus on written content far more than the design.

People often obsess over designs because they feel that if the site doesn’t look right, they won’t get business – the truth is that design is subjective – someone’s vision for how a website should rarely look often aligns with their visitor’s vision and this is the reason why a site that looks professional and appropriate is far more successful than a site that has some form of ‘visionary’ design aesthetic.

So, what is professional and appropriate?

Clean, simple, and timeless sites outperform overdesigned sites, so less is certainly more when it comes to your website’s look and feel.

There are three simple questions to ask yourself:

  1. Does the design of my site look professional?
  2. Does the site look appropriate for my niche?
  3. Is my site 100% focused on solving my visitor’s problem?

Does it look professional?

This is covered by having a clean and simple site that subtly builds on your branding without going overboard.

Appropriate architecture, fonts, colour and images handle this, and simplicity is the best approach.

Does it look appropriate?

Users will compare you to your competitors, so trying to look too different for the sake of it can send visitors bouncing back to the search.

This is a careful mix of being unique and on-brand but not so different that your visitors consider it inappropriate to others they see in the same niche.

Is your site 100% user-focussed?

Everything on the site should serve your users, not your ends, so if you’re too sales-orientated, they will bounce; if you write waffle, they will bounce, and if you don’t answer their needs, they will bounce.

So, how do you pull all this together?

  • You plan and write user-focused content.
  • The design of your site affirms the points the user needs affirming.
  • You provide the answer to their question as quickly as you can.

The good news is that we can help you with this; we’ll write page plans and suggest content for your site that is user-focused and designed to convert.

You can then use these plans to confidently write the content for each page, knowing that it’s the correct type of content to get your site ranking and converting.

Once we have the content, we get into the design.

Content leads to design, so it’s our job to take your site content and design your site around it.

If we design first, you are effectively writing content to fit a design rather than writing the content that needs to go on your site. 

Supplying the content before the design means several things:

  1. Better design – the design is aligned with your content, so the site’s design is vastly improved.
  2. Less back-and-forth – if we design, then you write; if the content you write does not match the dummy content we’ve used for the design, we must do it all again.
  3. A more cohesive website: design first and content second—can lead to patchwork in UX and UI elements as they can change so much.
  4. Faster delivery – once we have all the content for your site, we book in project sprints so our team gets things done quicker.

We’ll help you get this sorted.

We’ve built many websites, and we know and understand Google’s EEAT guidelines (currently running at 170 pages). So, we can help you plan the content for your site, review the content you write, and ensure it’s 100% correct before it goes live.

This process does mean more thinking and planning during the first stages of the project, but it ensures that you don’t end up with a site that looks great but achieves nothing.