I had an interesting conversation with a prospective client yesterday. She told me she was a designer/SEO who wanted to develop 3 sites for a client of hers. All 3 needed copy. However, she had no ideas about the types of pages the sites would have.

"Where do you start?" she asked.

I, personally, always start with the site visitor. Whether you want to hear it or not, visitors care about what you can offer THEM, they don't care about you. If you can't provide what they need, they'll simply go to the other 100's of companies that can. So, when deciding on which pages to include in a site (and what type of copy to include on each page) I look to the site visitor.

What questions do they need answered? Will they fully understand the concept of the product/service or is a FAQ page in order? Is there a lot of information that needs to be broken down into small sections/pages? Is this a product/service that would benefit from a sales letter or does it need many pages of copy? What communication style does the primary target audience have? Where are they in the buying process?

The answers to all of these questions and others will give you a wonderful place to start developing pages for your site.

Just remember, the customer is the one with the money so your site needs to be all about him/her.

Thanks for the useful info, copywriter.

I suppose what you say is common sense, but it's so easy to overlook when one is buried in the details of coding, etc. :)

Maybe the only addition I could offer is 'Will the site-map / layout of the site appear obvious to a new visitor?'

Good thought, but that would fall under some other venue than copywriting :)