Planning your content

Start by considering who your content is for. Your content might be for more than one group of people.

For example, someone booking a funeral and attending a funeral will need different information.

If you have different content for different customers, you need to decide how to display it.

You might need to use subheadings, or you might need a separate page.

Once you know who your customers are, consider the proposition.

Decide exactly what you want your customer to do after reading your content and identify what the transaction is. This could be filling in a form, contacting us or looking at GOV.UK for more information.

This will make your content focused and make it clear what the customer needs to do.

You need to plan out the process that your customer needs to follow.

This includes everything they will need to complete the transaction, such as their National Insurance Number for example. You will also need to include any relevant dates and deadlines.

 

After you have planned the process for the customer, you need to decide what happens once the customer has completed the transaction.

This includes whether you will acknowledge their contact, how long it will take for you to reply to them and what you will do.

 

If your content is about something taking place within a certain timeframe, such as an event or a consultation, you need to plan each stage.

This means creating content before the event takes place, changing it while the event is taking place, then updating it afterwards.

Before you publish your content to begin with, you need to know what is going to happen to it at each of these stages.