From our point of view the process in outline is:
If you have asked for a web content management system, we usually load up the current text etc for the website at first launch. Whether content managed or not, we will need to have gathered the following assets early on in the development timetable:
Incidentally, we base our estimate on the timely arrival of third-party assets (ie the ones that we are not organising for you) - essentially this is 'time is of the essence'. If this doesn't happen it will negatively impact on the budget and the timetable.
Don't underestimate how long this might take! Particularly preparing text that you are happy with.
Once you've commissioned a website, you become involved in its development. These are some of the areas that will particularly involve you:
Images are a prerequisite of any interesting website, and we can cover the art direction of photographs, bearing in mind it generally pays off to use a professional photographer or a stock library unless you have the facilities to shoot your own competently.
If you're going to the expense of a professional photographer then it's as well to shoot for print as well as the web. To avoid the need for scanning, it's best to shoot on digital, but you'll need a good camera to deliver the required quality.
There are two issues with 'copy' for the web. The first is that people usually read web pages very quickly and so being concise is an asset; the second is that one of the things that search engines do when judging the relevance of your pages is count word frequency (though these days the metrics are more sophisticated than that) which calls for plenty of text. Clearly these objectives are at odds with each other.
Fortunately search engines not only look at individual pages but at the whole site. This means that you can provide concise pages for your human visitors' initial consumption, then link through to white papers, case studies etc to provide additional information should they want to delve more deeply with the side benefit of giving the search engines something to chew on.
The more useful your 'long text' to visitors, the greater the likelihood that this information will be linked to by other websites. This can be a good viral marketing strategy.
2010 © Caz Limited