Our job is to help you get your job done.

I’ve spent over fifteen years building websites for clients, and one of the biggest lessons I’ve learned is a simple one: if you leave it up to the client to get back to you with what you need, you can kiss the delivery date goodbye.

What’s not so immediately obvious though is *why* this happens. On the surface of it, it seems pretty simple. They were busy with other stuff, and left all the content generation / getting the images together / giving you a sitemap until the last minute, at which point it was too late, and you didn’t have enough time to get it all together and turn it into a website.

In my experience though, it’s usually not as simple as that. Sure, it’s bound to be the case sometimes, but there are a number of other explanations as to how you got to this place.

The first is simply that you put unrealistic expectations on the client’s ability to deliver. Asking them to get you 40 pages of copy ready for when you start development in two weeks is never going to happen.

That’s also a fairly easy one though. So what happens when we start to dig deeper? You’ve given them plenty of time, plenty of heads up, hounded them for weeks, and yet it’s still not even close to ready? You’ve probably failed to understand what the client needs to get the content delivered.

This can be different for every situation, but it comes down to understanding the internal structure of their business, and the barriers that are stopping them from getting their job done - and once you recognize those barriers, to try and work out how you can help.

As an example, you’re working with the marketing team, this is their sole project, but the development kickoff is rapidly approaching and there’s no sign of the content. Are there resources on their own end that are delaying them getting started on the content? A missing content strategy? Can’t get a hold of the right people? Getting conflicting input from stakeholders? Or perhaps they’re getting it written, but delay is getting it signed off?

Sometimes it’s as simple as they really just don’t know where to start - they’ve bitten off more than they can chew, and you need to identify this and provide some structure for them to work to.

You won’t always be able to help, but a lot of the time you can. Simplify the job by giving them a pre-filled content map they can fill out, or point them in the direction of www.gathercontent.com. Other times, it might be a case of taking what they’ve done, put it into action, so at least you have *something* up there, and hey, nothing gets stakeholders to review something faster than “this is going live in two weeks, if you want to review it before then, get on to it!”

So maybe you know a business owner who is looking to do something with their website, but they keep putting it off because they don’t think they have the time or they just don’t know where to start. They’re customers I’d love to speak to, so if you know anyone in that sort of situation, feel free to get in touch at the form below!