Most website projects stall in the same place. The design is approved, the build is half finished, and then everything waits on words nobody was asked to write. At Growth Bully, a Malta performance marketing agency, we treat the content as the first deliverable rather than the last, because the content decides what the design has to do.
Content preparation is usually handled as a shopping list for the designer: copy, images, logos, legal pages. That framing is why so much of it gets written and then quietly ignored. The more useful question is what the finished site has to produce for the business, and then which words produce it.
What content do you need before a website is designed?
You need the job of each page in one sentence, the offer and proof for the pages that sell, the headline and first paragraph, the question the page answers, the call to action, the form fields, and the thank you page. Images and polish come after. Those seven decide the layout.
Notice what is missing from that list. There is no page count, no sitemap and no navigation structure, because those follow from the jobs rather than the other way round. A designer who has the seven items above can lay out a page that works. A designer who has a sitemap and a folder of photos is guessing.
Which page should you write first?
Write the page your best lead lands on first, rarely the home page. If you advertise a service, that service page earns the enquiries and the home page gets the people who already know you. Writing the earning page first forces the offer, the proof and the form to be decided while there is still time to change them.
Working inside out has a second benefit. Once the main service page is written, the home page becomes an easy summary of it rather than a blank sheet. The same goes for the second and third service pages: they borrow structure from the first one and take hours rather than days.
What does every page need before it can be designed?
Every page needs five things: one sentence saying who it is for and what it does, the single question it answers, the headline and opening paragraph, the one action you want taken, and the proof that makes that action reasonable. If a page cannot supply all five, it is not a page yet and should be merged or dropped.
- The job. One sentence. "Convince a homeowner comparing three installers to request a site visit."
- The question. The phrase a buyer would actually type or ask, written as they would say it.
- The opening. Headline plus a short paragraph that answers the question before any scrolling.
- The action. One primary action per page, named as an outcome rather than a mechanism.
- The proof. Something checkable: a result, a method, a guarantee, a named client, a credential.
Pages that pass this test tend to be shorter than the ones that fail it. The failing page is usually long because it is covering for a job nobody defined.
What should the form ask?
Ask only what you need to decide whether to call back, and ask it in the order a person is willing to answer. Name, the thing they want and a way to reach them is usually enough. Every extra field costs enquiries, so anything you can look up or ask on the call should not be on the form.
Decide the form before the design, because it changes the page. A three-field form sits inline next to the offer. A ten-field application needs its own step and a reason to complete it. Decide too where the submission goes, who is notified and how fast, which is the part of a web build that most often arrives unowned. Our note on getting form submissions into a CRM covers the routing, and what actually lifts landing page conversion covers the page around it.
What proof do you need, and what if you have none?
You need proof on every page that asks for money or time: a result with a number, a named client, a credible method, or a guarantee you will honour. If you have none of those yet, say what you do and how you work, and never invent a statistic. An invented number is the one thing a buyer can check.
Collect proof as a separate task with its own owner and deadline, because it is the content item most likely to be missing on handover day. Three testimonials, two before and after figures and one short client story will carry a whole site. Chasing them while the build waits is how a two-week delay becomes six.
Who signs off the words, and when?
One named person signs off each page, and sign off happens before design, not after. Legal, regulatory and pricing wording needs its own owner, usually someone who was not in the content meeting. Agree the review window in days and in writing, because an unscheduled approval is the most common reason a launch date moves.
- Draft owner writes the page against the five-item test.
- Subject owner checks the facts, the claims and anything regulated.
- One decision maker approves the words, in one pass, inside an agreed window.
- Only then does the page go to design.
Two passes are fine. Six passes mean the job of the page was never agreed. If that happens, stop editing and go back to the one-sentence job. What a discovery workshop decides is the cheapest place to settle it, and how to write a content brief is the format for the pages themselves.
What goes wrong when design starts before the content?
The design starts dictating the words. Boxes appear that need filling, so copy gets written to a character count instead of to a buyer, and the strongest argument gets cut because it does not fit the panel. The result looks finished and converts badly, which is the hardest kind of website to diagnose later.
The second failure is slower and more expensive. Placeholder content goes live because the real content never arrived, the site launches thin, and the pages that were supposed to earn enquiries sit unfinished for months. Our note on how long a website really takes makes the same point about timelines: most of the delay sits on the client side of the line and is forecastable.
What should you hold before design begins?
You should hold a written page list with one job per page, finished words for the pages that earn enquiries, a decided form and thank you page, a proof file, a named owner per page and an agreed approval window. That is a content pack, and a site built from one launches on its date and starts working immediately.
Everything else is genuinely a design decision. Picture style, section order, colour and spacing all belong to whoever is building the thing, and they do that job better when the words are settled. If you want the pages planned around enquiries rather than around a template, our website work and our lead generation approach start from the same place.
If you want a site whose pages are written to produce enquiries rather than to fill a layout, tell us what you sell and who buys it and we will map the pages that have to earn.