4 Ways to Improve Your Website Content Collection Process

If your current website content workflow continually creates hurdles or bottlenecks, turn to website content collection tools to streamline your process. Bottlenecks occur when clients are unclear about expectations and leave you hanging with the content or feedback that they agreed to provide. This can then shorten the time you have to finish building the website, as you are left without the necessary elements until too close to a deadline.

That’s not the only speed bump in the web design process, though. There are several common content collection problems that arise when working with clients, most of which can be solved by utilizing content collection tools. Learning to predict these issues and quickly source immediate solutions can save time and money, as well as open the door for a stronger relationship with your clients.

Motivating your clients and staying on track with your website content collection is simpler when you have the right tools at your disposal. Use content collection tools to generate great content, set clear expectations, and collaborate on a live website.

In a world where content is king, don’t let sloppy collection processes throw a coup d’état.

1. Teach Clients How to Provide Great Content

Create step-by-step instructions or a style guide for your clients. Making content for the web may be new to them, so highly specific guidelines will help get them started. How many characters can fit in each headline? What kind of language works best in a blog post? Outline each step to prevent delays. Go a step further and provide examples or a template.

Formatting especially may have specific rules to follow due to the website layout. By designing a guide that outlines these up front, you can save both yourself and your clients a significant amount of time that would be otherwise spent on redrafting.

2. Set Clear Expectations

Another issue that can arise is missed deadlines. Each time a client delays content submissions, they create a bottleneck that prevents you from moving to the next stage of the project. Perhaps they expect you to have other work that can be done on the website in the meantime, or they simply don’t realize how much time has lapsed. Regardless, it is a major challenge to be left hanging without content.

Start off on the right foot by setting clear expectations for when content must be delivered, and what can happen to the overall project timeline if deadlines are missed.

Help your clients to understand that content is required for progress to be made on a website building project. Relying on tools such as a shared calendar or locking down content dates in the contract can prevent these kinds of delays.

Better yet, use tools that encourage content requests directly within the website design. By flagging specific places that need content and sending a time-limited request from these places on the design, clients can see exactly what is required and when. Collaborative tools like these move the content creation process along as you are both able to keep track of required content.

3. Visualize Together with Content Collection Tools

Poor brand alignment can delay content creation. This frequently occurs when clients struggle to translate their branding information to a content medium such as blogging. When you spend hours re-drafting their submitted work together, more time is lost.

Instead, providing content collection opportunities that permit editing directly in the website can help improve the early drafts as clients visualize how much content they need to generate. Using these tools can help to shape the tone and length of each section.

Like other collaborative tools, providing the immediacy of visualizing content in its final destination helps to influence clients’ creative processes. You’ll be able to get right to the point by having the needed information present, editable, and in view for both of you.

4. Invest in a content collection tool such as SimpleStage

Once you identify a need for content collection tools, turn to SimpleStage. SimpleStage provides easy collaboration on top of the website design for both you and your clients.

Have your clients drop content directly into the wireframes or in-progress designs to get work in place faster and draft as needed. Seeing the limitation of space and the shape of text can help you eliminate unnecessary words and highlight the salient points.

SimpleStage also makes it possible to work on content together within the platform. This takes away the need to send documents back and forth via email. It also prevents potential lost content in the process and allows both of you to see each iteration of the content live on the website design.

Improve your content collection process by using SimpleStage’s tools for website content collection. Communicate with clients better for great content, clear expectations, and improved collaborations.

Go from Bottleneck to Opportunity

Collaboration brings with it challenges in the content creation world. Keeping clients on the same page is one such challenge. But you can turn content collection bottlenecks into content collection opportunities and make a smooth-moving, content-generation machine.

Challenges in the website content collection stages open doors for clearer communication, precise strategy, and stronger collaboration. When you work with clients to use the correct content workflow tools and keep the website project going strong, you get the added benefit of building a better client relationship.