· Process · 4 min read
The standard way to build a website is: design the pages with dummy text, get them approved, develop, and ask for the real content at the end. We worked that way too, until we counted how many days it burns.
What actually happens at the end
Real copy is never the length of dummy copy. A headline that sat on one line in the design takes three. A product description drawn for four lines has one. At that point the design has to be redone — after it was approved and built.
The second problem is more expensive than the first: when the client sees real copy inside a finished design, they understand for the first time what the site is actually saying. And often it is not what they meant. The changes that arrive at that point are not corrections, they are a rethink.
The inversion
We write the copy on day two, before a single pixel exists. The client approves it as a document, with no design around it to distract. From then on the design has real lengths to work with and does not get redone.
Approving the words on day two costs a day. Approving them on day twenty costs a week.
It is the single change that shortened our delivery times most. Not a technology, not a tool: the order of the stages.