So, you're responsible for doing a whole new website? I'll tell you why it will be late: Content.
Writing the content for a new or redesigned website is the most underestimated part of any project. Odds are you will spend more hours writing than your production team does designing and programming.
Here's a way to calculate a realistic time requirement for the hard, hard work of writing. I'll use a fictitious B2B client, ClientCo, to illustrate.
1. Quick and Dirty Content Audit
Pull out your sitemap. (You've got one, right?) Count up the pages that need content. Use common sense; ignore old news, events and blogs. Just focus on what's new!
Here's the sitemap for ClientCo:
ClientCo has 18 product pages, 12 solutions pages, 5 major about pages (plus a handful of leadership bios to write), and 3 major Careers pages. We're assuming that the News, Blog and Contact pages only need a sentence or two at most, and that we are migrating existing Articles, Resources, Events and Press Releases from the old site and don't need to re-write them. We'll also ignore the home page for now; it's a task unto itself.
18+12+5+3=38, plus let's assume 5 bios to write for the executive team. Call it 43 pages total.
2. Know Your Workflow
Someone has to provide the content, and someone has to write it – and they probably shouldn't be the same person. (Sorry, but Subject Matter Experts are often the worst web writers—it's easy to get into the weeds when you know so much!)
If you're optimizing for SEO, your SEO analyst will need to help as well. And, of course, someone has to slug it into the website's content management system. It probably looks something like this:
Each task needs a time estimate. (I've provided some good starting points above.) Note also that your SEO analyst will need a bunch of hours for basic research before any of this page-level stuff, and your writer will need time to become familiar with your company's brand and voice, market positioning, offerings, and audiences.
3. Add 'em up!
Take the median time required for each task, add them up, and then multiply that by the number of pages you have to create. Here's how ClientCo's sitemap and workflow add up for each role and in total:
If that made you break out in a cold sweat, congratulations—you did it correctly!
The hard part
My fictitious ClientCo project calculates out at 371 hours of effort. That's 9 weeks and 2 days at 40 hours/week.
It's a lot of work, but when you break it back down by role, and realize that you will be dividing up work across Subject Matter Experts and possibly a couple of writers to share the load, it's not quite as overwhelming.
(And your web developer will handle the task of slugging your content into the site and adding all the supporting graphic design.)
Still, it's a lot of time. Talk to your team about their availability, huddle up with your producer, and adjust your project schedule if you have to—better now than later.
Now you have the tools. Get to it!
Special Thanks
I'd like to extend a special thanks to Kristina Halvorson, Karen McGrane, and Liam King, for their for invaluable writings and fantastic presentations over the years. I've learned a ton from you!
