How to send your website copy to WebCami

I’m often asked what is the best way to send me text changes or text content for your website.  This can be applied to both new website projects, as well as changes to an existing website.

New website projects

There are two types of new projects I work on.  Brand new websites from scratch and website redesigns. Here are some tips:

• In both cases, your site map is your guide for sending page content.  You need to have content on all the pages linked in your site navigation.
• Placing the content in Word document works great.  I also use Google Drive.
• Follow your site map and add your text content following your page navigation.  You can include notes for me, like “use photo title example.jpg located in Dropbox“.
• Never insert your photos in the document.  They can’t easily be extracted. Better to reference them.
• Include hyperlinks if you have them.  You can directly hyperlink in your document or reference the link next to the words you want to highlight.
• Don’t bother with formatting unless you want something very specific. I will format it according to our design.
• If we are redesigning your website, you can reference or cut and paste in the content from the current site if it’s staying the same.
• If it’s being edited, send the fully edited text, not descriptions like “paragraph two, line three, change…”  It’s more efficient in most cases to cut and paste in a whole paragraph.

Existing website changes

If you don’t have time to address changes to your existing site,  you can always ask me to do it for you.  Best practices for editing existing copy are:

• Make sure you send me the link to the page or pages you want to be edited.
• If your changes are small, like you are changing hours or a phone number, just email that to me.  No word doc is needed.
• If there are extensive changes, use a Word doc.  If only a couple of paragraphs are changing, note them and include the entire paragraph, not just the sentences/words changing
• If it’s a brand new page, use the tips above for a new project.  Be sure to include where the page needs to be inserted in your sitemap (navigation).
• If you have photos to change, create a guide for me referencing the file names and where you want the photos to go.  Include captions if you need them.

Here’s a quick video with example documents:

Remember, I’m here for you if you need help getting your notes together. Just reach out! And if we are working on a BIG project, we can scale this with a spreadsheet, too. More to come on that in the future!