Working Together: Content

With a new website in build, The Carers’ Centre needed to think about the content required to populate the site. This, we now know, is easier said than done!

The website reflects a new style, layout, and user-focused ethos for the charity. To ensure our tone and content followed suit, we soon realised that a lot of the copy and media that was held on the old website was not suitable to simply transfer across. Additionally, the old website was not serving our audiences’ core needs. Planning how to manage new site content is a big job (bigger than we thought!). Here are the 4 key lessons we learned along the way, with help from Digital Wonderlab.

Start early

Good content requires input from multiple people. Managers need to explain what their services are; how they benefit users. Staff and trustees need to provide bio’s and photographs. Fundraisers or volunteer co-ordinators need to explain why and how people can give money or time to the organisation. Historical information needs to be sought out (our timeline took a while to put together!). When you are relying on other people as well as yourself, not giving enough time to collate, and chase, on information can cause stress and challenges towards the end. We had planned quite a bit of time in for this, but even so we felt it near to launch! It’s definitely good to start early, even if this is just preparing other people so they are ready when you come with key questions and input you need.

Laura from Digital Wonderlab notes:

“Janine and the team are not alone here, people definitely underestimate the amount of effort it takes to do this well. People often start the journey thinking they can take copy from their existing site but historically many organisations don’t change their websites very often. If they have had a CMS that has not allowed them to grow their online content at the same speed that their organisation has evolved, then people quite rightly see this as a time to start afresh, and that takes time. If you do have many people contributing to the content, it is worth creating a consistent brand narrative. There will always be an editorial piece that needs to take place to ensure all copy has the same tone and flow for each area. You might need a slightly different tone for some users but the tone within each section should be consistent.”

Have a good plan / planning tool

With more pages than I care to count, it was vital that we used a planning tool, keeping track of content that needed to be done, was in progress or was complete and could be added. It was key to use a tool where people could collaborate, comment or add questions, and a place to follow these comments. We opted for a Trello board, this clearly shared our progress with content development and sent alerts when additional information or support was required. In the final push to get everything done by the deadline this did slightly go out of the window! We began to write directly in the site, rather than in draft form. Nevertheless, it was valuable to collate content whilst we were waiting for the site to be built. If we waited for the site to be built before starting to get content ready, the site would have taken a lot longer to launch.

“Online collaboration tools such as Trello are great for assigning activities to different owners and for allowing everyone involved in the project to see exactly how the content is developing. Wireframes give you a great structure that can be used as the template.” Laura, Digital Wonderlab

Check in with your user profiles

“The team invested time and energy to speak to their stakeholders. They shared valuable insights throughout the discovery period in order to create user profiles that spoke to each group. It is all too easy to fall back into bad habits and focus on the information you as an organisation want to put out in the world. Keeping profiles front and centre ensures everything you write is speaking to your stakeholders, giving them the information they want to know in the way they want to hear it.” Laura, Digital Wonderlab

Our stakeholder research, and the creation of user profiles was key to content development. For example, when looking at creating pages for young carers, we needed to amend the style and tone of the content to be more relatable to children. The tone used in the professionals section of the website is slightly different to that in the other sections. Again, in the race to the finish we could have spent more time checking back over the site to ensure we’d got this right. Yet just because we didn’t do this pre-launch, it doesn’t mean we can’t do this after launch! We always knew the site would be something that we continued to develop long after the launch date. We will regularly be checking to ensure our user profiles are still right, and that we are delivering their needs.

Prioritise what you need for launch (your MVP)

There is so much we want to have on our new site. New information and advice articles for carers; content for the support networks that surround carers; better information for professionals; a section for employers. Had we written everything we wanted before launch we wouldn’t have launched until 2023 — in fact, we might never have launched!, We want the content to be an ever-growing piece of work, that responds to the changing needs of our users.

We therefore needed to be realistic about what was (actually) required by launch. Several parts of the site could be added at a later date, so we decided to focus on the areas of main importance. This made the job of content development much more manageable.

“It’s true — prioritisation is key! We chose a Content Management System (CMS) that will allow the team to continually add and change content, so the pressure to have everything ready for launch was removed. There is often fear, due to many historic systems not allowing people to change their websites without going to their developers, that you need to get all the content complete for launch. My advice is that if you want to keep your website alive and relevant you need to choose a system that you can update easily. Agree what content is essential for launch and plan how you want to build out the other pages after.”
Laura, Digital Wonderlab

For us, content is a key part of whether our site achieves what we need it to. It was a critical part of this web build. Our main reflection is that it was a bigger part than we thought — you can’t underestimate the resource you need, and hats off to our Communications Manager Jorden Williams for delivering it all so ably!