How to Build a Website for a Client without Content

Sometimes we are brought on to build websites for clients who don’t want to hire us for content creation. While you may be just as much of a rock star writer as you are a website designer, it is important to do what our clients want, and if that’s developing a good website without writing the content, here are some places to look for great filler.

Create Empty Wireframe

Your first option is simply to create an empty wireframe, or WordPress design, that doesn’t include the content text but does include HTML and CSS that will produce the right content when added.

This is the easiest way to go, and may work on some designs, but will not facilitate a great handover of the site to your client.

The empty website will look just that. Empty. If your homepage is dynamic and uses posts or pages or featured images to fill in content areas, blank pages may not cut it. Instead, here are some other options to get you going.

Create Mindless Placeholders

For some sites, I’ve created dummy placeholders that instruct the client how to proceed. Consider a footer widget that says “this is a great place for a 1-2 sentence description of your company.” Or, alternatively, add a new page with just a couple of sentences about what the client does.

If your client is a go-getter and needs a little instruction, this is a great way to get them started. It also helps your client gauge how the fonts, colors, and layout will gel when they add their own text.

It is also great to use just a few sentences about the company if it is possible that live visitors will come to the site before they get their own content in place and published.

Lorem Ipsum

Lorem ipsum dolor sit amet, consectetur adipisicing elit, sed do eiusmod tempor incididunt ut labore et dolore magna aliqua. Ut enim ad minim veniam, quis nostrud exercitation ullamco laboris nisi ut aliquip ex ea commodo consequat. Duis aute irure dolor in reprehenderit in voluptate velit esse cillum dolore eu fugiat nulla pariatur. Excepteur sint occaecat cupidatat non proident, sunt in culpa qui officia deserunt mollit anim id est laborum.

Does that look familiar? It may, because it is the standard typesetting filler text that has been used since the 1500s. According to lipsum, the text is 2000 year old Latin from a classical text titled The Extremes of Good and Evil by Cicero. It was written in the year 45 B.C.E.

This can be better filler text for longer passages that require more than just a couple of sentences of instruction or basic information. You can generate Lorem Ipsum text quickly and easily, and most people that see it will recognize it as a placeholder.

Also, the Latin text looks similar to English or other similarly lettered languages at a glance, to give you the vibe of your new site once the real text is added.

You can generate Lorem Ipsum text for free at lipsum with just a few clicks.

Hipster Ipsum

Do you want something a little more modern than 2000 year old Latin text? Do you want a little flair instead of the Lorem Ipsum option? Luckily there are clever people out there who added the entire hipster dictionary to a random text generator and Hipster Ipsum was born.

When I’m doing a design and need more than a couple of sentences of filler text, I hop over to Hipster Ipsum and generate whatever I need. Each visit will give you something new, and reading through the output will usually give you and your client a good chuckle.

Here’s a recent passage I generated, throwing in a little Latin too:

Thundercats iPhone butcher wayfarers, meh enim raw denim Carles aliquip chillwave fanny pack cray laboris small batch yr. Street art odio Shoreditch, Pinterest whatever kitsch keytar yr. Vinyl aute scenester duis ugh, farm-to-table wayfarers labore literally lomo. XOXO vinyl High Life cliche banh mi placeat, Vice incididunt in. Sustainable street art whatever elit, tousled vinyl photo booth narwhal sapiente incididunt veniam quis. Typewriter biodiesel squid mumblecore banjo. Nostrud mixtape occupy pickled, photo booth flannel sriracha.

So there you have it. Thundercats, iPhone, flannel, and sriracha all in one place. What can be cooler than that?

Grab your Hipster Ipsum at Hipsum.co.

Honorable Mentions

Fellow designer Allison Rolls read this post and introduced me to Cupcake Ipsum. Pretty much like Hipster Ipsum but less pretentious and more delicious.

Jeff Fruhwirth of Sustainable Life Blog sent me Social Good Ipsum.

Rebecka Hathaway prefers Bacon Ipsum, which may be even more hipster than my suggestion.

And Jami Mays keeps it real with Samuel L. Ipsum… mother fucker!

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