We have been ready to launch one of our client website for several weeks now, but because our client is so busy, they are unable to help us complete the content that the site needs for us to go live. This isn’t unusual.

Very often when we are engaged to create a website we need to convince our clients about the need to spend quality time on their content. The client will often think that it will only take them a few minutes to deliver the content they need, and more often then not, this just isn’t the case. Professional content editors can take several hours on each page before they are happy with the way it reads and the message each page is delivering.

Convincing our client is even more difficult when it is a site re-design, because they often feel that just moving the content from the old site to the new site is all that it will take. They fail to take into consideration the additional functionality they are asking for (such as media links, news links etc), all of which require new content to be written or updated for the new site.

We help our clients as much as we can, giving them a ‘to-do-list’ for each snippet of content, which includes estimated effort and even tip sheets on how to create, proof and edit content. This helps significantly, but at the end of the day, the client needs to allocate real time to the project.

We are happy to wait and don’t mind the delay, espcially when our client is obviously so busy at the moment, but it is a lesson once again learnt… the web designer is not the only member of the project team for your new website. The client is an extremely important member of the team, without which the project cannot complete.