Sometimes we are brought on to build out websites for clients who don’t want to hire us for content creation as well. While you may be just as much of a rock star writer as you are website designer, it is important to do what our clients want, and if it is develop a good website without writing the content, here are some places to look for great filler.
Create Empty Wireframe
Your first option is to simply 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 it is 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. I’ve created footer widgets that say “this is a great place for a 1-2 sentence description of your company” or 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 lets you and your client see how the fonts, colors, and layout will come together when they replace the text with 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. Lorem Ipsum text can be generated quickly and easily and most people that see it will recognize it as a placeholder.
Also, the Latin text looks at a glance similar to English or other similarly lettered languages to give you the vibe that your new site will have 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 sentences of filler text, I hop over to Hipster Ipsum and generate whatever I need. Each visit will give you something new, and if you really read 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 Mention – Cupcake Ipsum
Fellow designer Allison Rolls read this post and introduced me to Cupcake Ipsum. Pretty much like Hipster Ipsum but less pretentious and more delicious.
How to Build a Website for a Client without Content is a post from: Narrow Bridge Media