Do You Need Content to Design a Website? A Designer Opinion
If you are a product designer, a web designer, a graphic designer… you name it, chances are that too often you have heard your client or boss saying, "I need you to design me a website". The following natural question from your side is "What is the content?". And too often, the following reply is, "I don't have the content. Can you just start with the design?"
So what follows here in this article is an honest opinion formed during my past 10 years of experience as a product, web, graphic designer … and how it is approached by junior and more senior designers.
Let's start with the answer.
So let me immediately tell you that the answer is based on two factors. The first factor is the designer's experience, and the second factor is the budget and timeline of the client (or who is requesting the website).
So the answer is yes, you can design a website with no content, but you will have to spend more time (and time, most often than not, means money) in the long run.
Understanding the design process.
As designers, our job is to make users' lives easier by providing them with seamless experiences. To be able to do this, we must have the right tools. Now, let's not get into too many details about what designers actually do. But some of these tools are knowledge of the users and understanding the goals of whoever is targeting users.
If a designer is provided with the above, they will be able to deliver a better product in a shorter time as they will not need to spend time on user research or guessing about the company objectives.
What happens when there is no content to work with?
This is where the difference is made by the time available and the designer's skills.
Designers will have to base much of their decisions on experience, and consequently, most junior designers will struggle more with this part.
The work will also need to start with designs (or wireframes) that are very low fidelity. And this means that the details will be very generic.
As the designer doesn't have access to detailed information about the content, they won't produce accurate solutions for problems that may be easily identifiable if the content was provided.
All this results in more iterations needed, which will delay the launch of the final product.
Another problem generated by the lack of content is the need for the whole team to be constantly in touch with each other. And we don't mean in touch as in talking with each other, which is always a positive thing. It means using more resources to reach the same result as if the content was provided initially. More reviews are needed, and more iterations will need to be produced.
A natural consequence of the last point is also more time needed to accomplish these tasks.
The benefit of having good content
Provide your designers with good, structured and professional content is highly beneficial for any company.
Designers who can work with good content will make more accurate decisions and design the best solution that perfectly fits the company and the users.
They will also provide the client with excellent recommendations, based on the company needs, that will improve the user experience. If they are not provided with content, they are left to guess, and there will be too many open-ended options.
Best practices and possible solutions
Having worked as a product designer for years, I completely understand that it is not always possible for a company to have complete content ahead of the design phases.
However, good practices dictate that the design team should be provided with a good idea of the content and a first draft to benefit everyone, especially the company.
There are, of course, several ways a designer can go and should go to help a company that doesn't provide content for a product; however it will impact the time and cost of the final work.
Some helpful steps to follow when no copy is provided
Understand the users
Understand the company (client) goal
Build content overview maps with the help of the client
Iterate on the above map until you reach a good option for what the generic content is
Move on to designing low fidelity wireframes
Iterate on the wireframes adding always more details until the final copy is ready and supplied
While working on wireframes, the look and feel of the website can also be started for initial sign off.
Conclusions
It certainly is possible to design a website with no content.
From a designer point of view, this will result in more work needed (including research) and more design iterations.
From a client point of view, this will result in slower progress and possibly more money needed to achieve the same result.