How to collect website content from busy colleagues
Get words, images and approvals out of colleagues who have day jobs so a website build stops waiting and actually reaches launch.
The build is finished and the site is empty
The design was approved six weeks ago. The developer has nothing left to do. Launch has moved twice because the head of one division has not sent his service description and the operations lead has not found a single usable photograph of the plant. Everyone involved is working hard on something else and the website is nobody's actual job.
Content is the most common reason a website project runs late and almost nobody plans for it. The reason is a mismatch of formats. A website project asks a busy specialist to produce finished prose. That is a writing task and your colleague is not a writer. What they do have is the knowledge and twenty minutes.
What this costs and what nobody has budgeted
A website quotation almost always excludes content. Copywriting, translation, product data entry, photography and the chasing of approvals sit outside the build fee unless the scope names them. Read the proposal for that line before you sign because this is where projects stall and where goodwill gets spent. Content work bought separately carries GST at 18% on the fee.
The hidden cost is delay. Every week a finished build waits for words is a week of hosting paid, a week of campaign plans suspended and a week of your own attention spent on reminders. Developers also lose context when a project is paused and reassembling it later takes longer than finishing it would have.
When a process is the wrong answer
If there are two of you do not build a content workflow. Sit with a recorder for an hour, talk through each page and have the recording transcribed. A spreadsheet of owners and deadlines for a two-person business is overhead pretending to be organisation.
More importantly, if nobody in the business can describe the offer in plain writing then no collection process will rescue the project. That is a positioning problem rather than a content problem and a larger website will make it worse by giving the confusion more pages to spread across. Settle what you sell and to whom first. The same caution applies to a business where the person holding all the knowledge is the owner and the owner is the bottleneck. Hiring a writer to interview them is cheaper than six weeks of reminders.
How to actually get the material
Stop asking for prose. Ask for raw material. Request the last three proposals a colleague sent, the questions customers ask most often and the two things competitors claim that irritate them. That is a twenty-minute favour rather than a writing assignment and it contains everything a writer needs. Better still book a thirty-minute call, record it, and send back a draft for correction. People will edit a draft they disagree with far faster than they will create one from nothing.
Then make the request specific and small. One page per named person. A word count. An example of a page you consider good. A single deadline tied to a visible consequence rather than to a soft launch date. Give a template with the questions in order instead of a blank document, because a blank document is where enthusiasm dies.
Set a default. Tell each owner that the draft written on their behalf will publish as written unless they reply by the date. This converts the task from writing something to checking something and it removes the option of silence. Keep every request in one channel so nobody can claim it was lost in a different inbox, and keep a visible list of pages, owners and status that everyone can see.
How to judge whether the collection is working
The metric that matters is pages signed off per week against the number of pages remaining. Count signed off rather than received, because material sitting unreviewed is not progress. Alongside it watch the count of pages whose owner is past the deadline. One name appearing on that list twice is a management conversation rather than a reminder.
The metric that flatters is volume. Eleven attachments and a folder of photographs feel like cooperation and may contain nothing usable. Review comments flatter in the same way. A page attracting thirty comments is not well governed. It is a page with too many reviewers.
The common mistake
The usual mistake is circulating drafts to everyone for comment. Each reviewer adds a qualification to protect their own department and the page slowly fills with hedged sentences that commit to nothing. The version that survives consensus is almost always weaker than the first draft and it takes four weeks longer to produce.
Separate the two roles explicitly. One named person approves the words on each page. Others may be consulted and their comments are advisory. Write that down at the start of the project. Doing it later reads as a rebuke and by then the hedged version is already live.
Launch before it is perfect
A page that is good and published beats a page that is excellent and waiting. Set a launch date, publish what exists on the day and schedule improvements as normal work afterwards. Colleagues who ignored six reminders often find twenty minutes the week after a page goes live with their name on it. A real page in front of real customers creates urgency that a project plan never will.
This guide explains how something works. It is not legal, tax or financial advice, and rules change. Confirm anything regulatory with a qualified professional before you act on it.