A Guide to Website Content Development - Editing

We wrap up our video series on website content development with some tips on editing your website content. Please see the video below, or read the transcript below the video.

Hi! My name is Lina Calin, and I’m the Account Manager at Whittington Consulting. Welcome to the third and final installment in our content writing series.

In this series we’re discussing how to plan, write, and edit effective website content that communicates in the voice of your company while speaking directly to the needs of your customers.

We’ve already gone through the steps to plan and write our website content. So now it’s time for the final part of our process- Reviewing and editing our website copy.

Check it once

The first thing we want to do is go back through each page we’ve written to check for proper spelling and grammar, appropriate voice, and to make sure that our content accomplishes our goals. To make it easy, we can use this simple checklist!

1. Have I carefully read back through every page to check for spelling and grammar?
2. Does this content directly communicate to my intended audience? Have I answered my customers most frequently asked questions?
3. Am I using too much technical jargon, or can this be understood clearly by my intended readers?
4. Is my voice and attitude the same throughout all webpages?
5. What do I want site visitors to walk away with? What actions do I want them to take? Is my site content achieving this?
6. Would I read all of this information? Is every word here important?

Make sure it's scannable

Be sure that you’ve broken up long chunks of text. Usually, people only scan information that they read online, rather than reading it thoroughly. We want to make sure that they’ll get what they need from that scan!

Break up long paragraphs with subheadings, bulleted lists, and visuals.

But if you choose to use visuals in your website content, we want to make sure that they directly relate to and better illustrate your copy. Just including pictures that look nice or have vague relation to the content will both confuse and disinterest your reader.

Check it twice

Last but not least, review your content one more time! And after you’ve gone through the checklist again, get someone else to review what you’ve written. If your web design partners offer this service as a part of your contract, great! When you’ve reached this point, send it off to the designated person. If not, get someone with new eyes within your organization to review your content deck and make sure your copy flows well and covers all of the information it needs to. Alternately, you can see how much your web design firm would charge for content review services.

Now we’ve finished planning, writing, and editing content for your website! If you take the right steps to plan and develop your website text, you’ll create content that not only informs your website visitors, but assures them that engaging with your organization is their logical next step.

Thanks for joining us on this series! If you have any questions about content creation, or would like to partner with us to create content for your website, contact us!