I can't emphasize this idea too much. The whole purpose of your website is to present content, and by “content” I mean the text and any supporting images. The higher the quality of your content, the greater the value of your website. A website that looks fabulous but has crumby content is still a crumby website.
Visual design is quite important and it will be used to enhance your content. The important thing to realize is that it should not be used instead of good content. A weak sentence should be made stronger by re-writing it, not by making it bigger and bold.
I don't want you to get bogged down in this process trying to figure out stuff. The main idea is to just write and leave all formatting to me. Focus all your attention on the words.
The method I like to use, that serves to improve the quality of the content, is to publish the content with no presentational values at all. By stripping away all visual enhancements you can see the content for what it is. If it's not talking to you in plain text, it still won't talk if you put lipstick on it.
The first thing to do is have you, the expert on your site requirements, produce the complete content of the site, independently of all presentational values. By that that I mean; no color, no big fancy fonts, no positioning on the page, no navigation. Just the facts, ma'am.
That's right, I'll publish a page similar to this one, so we can look at the content of your site in its naked form and judge how well it reads. Any fixes can then be made, all to a single page.
Your site content is the foundation of your site and everything else will be constructed upon that foundation. Let's get the foundation built first.
By the way, writing quality content is also the first step to gaining higher search engine ranking.
If you haven't read my article on how to decide what to write, I strongly urge you to do so now, before you begin to write.
Now that you have a list of topics, copy it into a MS-Word document and make each topic a heading. Use sub-headings as required. (Think about using an outline for this purpose). Write simple sentences under each heading saying what needs to be said. Revise, as necessary.
When you're finished, send me the document. I'll mark it up with the proper semantic code (HTML) and publish it. At that time we can review it again on-line and make final edits.
In my task of marking up your text for inclusion in a web page I must strip away everything but the words themselves. All formatting must be cleared away. It is not just a copy-and-paste process.
Using the method described above will save you the time and distraction of working with formatting, and it will save me the time of undoing your efforts. This method also serves to focus ones attention on the words themselves, independently from any other influences.