The website designer needs to use a careful mixture of art, internet technologies and marketing knowledge to create your website design, functionality and focus. Designers will also need to deal with companies of a very wide range of industries. This can create a huge amount of information that might create an information overload. A way to make the whole process a lot faster is by giving him the content of the website in the best format possible as mentioned below:

What you should do…

• Provide the text content in either MSWord or Text document format.
• Organise the content so that it can be easily associated with its proper location on the website
• Send good quality images (At least 800×600 pixel resolution and in .gif, .jpg, .png formats)
• If the image is really big, make is smaller using a program such as Photo Resizer…
• Spell check the content before sending it and make sure it is correct. This will remove the need for duplicate work on the designer’s side
• Clearly mention where the images must appear within the website if they are content specific

What you should NOT do…

• Include complicated layouts inside your MSWord document
• Email image files that are 2 megabytes and above that might clog your or the designer’s inbox
• Send the content late, thus not giving the designer enough time to incorporate it into the website
• Give content (especially text) that are duplicated from another website since it will negatively influence your Google ranking
• Tell the designer to get the content from another website. This greatly slows the content integration
• Give a hard copy (paper printouts) of the content. If the designer has to retype the text then it creates a huge delay and might introduce a host of spelling and grammar mistakes
• Give hard copy versions of images for scanning. Rescanning an image drops the quality of the image. Rather try and find the original electronic version and email it

The basic rule of thumb is to keep the content as simple as possible and to organise it in a logical fashion. This will save you and the designer a lot of time and money.