Who writes the website copy and where do the photos come from?
How copy and imagery actually get produced on a website build, and what the client owes.
There are three honest options for website copy: we write it, you write it, or we interview your team and write it from that. Each one has a different timeline, and picking the wrong one is the most common reason a build runs late.
The three paths
- We write it. Fastest and most predictable. We work from discovery, your existing materials, and interviews, and you review. Best when nobody internally has time, which is most of the time.
- You write it. Cheapest on paper. It becomes the critical path immediately. If you choose this, assign one owner, agree on a date per page, and start before design finishes.
- We interview and write. The right call for technical, regulated, or highly specialized businesses where the expertise lives in someone's head. It costs a few hours of your experts' time and produces copy that sounds like you rather than like an industry brochure.
Whichever path you take, copy should be written before final design on the pages that matter. Designing around placeholder text and then pouring real copy in is how sections end up cramped.
Photography and imagery
Real photography beats stock whenever the photo shows people, facilities, or work you actually do. Buyers can tell, and a genuine photo of your team does more for trust than a perfect stock image of strangers in a conference room. Stock is fine for backgrounds, abstract concepts, and secondary pages where a real photo would add nothing.
If you shoot, shoot horizontal and vertical versions of key images so they work in both a wide hero and a mobile layout. Get more shots than you think you need.
Image specs, because they affect speed
Images are the usual reason a page is slow. The math is simple: a 4 MB hero image on a 5 Mbps mobile connection needs over six seconds just to arrive, which blows past Google's recommended Largest Contentful Paint threshold of 2.5 seconds at the 75th percentile. Export at the size the layout actually uses, compress, serve modern formats like WebP, and set width and height attributes so the layout does not shift while images load.
On rights: confirm you have a license for every image, including anything a previous vendor added. Stock licenses do not transfer automatically, and photographers often license by use and term.
Related: Do you handle website copywriting?, Why do Core Web Vitals and mobile page speed matter?, How do you write landing page copy that converts?, and our blog post on AI image generators and logo design.