Writing copy for the website

It took us about two days to write the copy for the website and for the first half day we wrote nothing at all but looked at other sites, and thought about what our visitors would want to know. Good site copy is concise, short, to the point with absolutely no jargon, but it doesn’t start off like this. Getting your ideas down is the first hurdle. You can always smarten it up later with a few tricks stolen from the world of journalism.

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It’s time to write the copy for the website so that Jason can start to put the site together design-wise. It took us about two days to write the copy for the website and for the first half day we wrote nothing at all but looked at other sites, and thought about what our visitors would want to know. Good site copy is concise, short, to the point with absolutely no jargon, but it doesn’t start off like this. Getting your ideas down is the first hurdle. You can always smarten it up later with a few tricks stolen from the world of journalism.

As you know we have the logo and name already in place but we needed a strap to sit under the logo that tells the visitor in five or six words exactly what the product does. For instance, ‘Flickr - the best way to store, search, sort and share your photos.’ The strap should be short, to the point and leave people in no doubt what your service does and/or who it’s aimed at.

Once you have the strap pinned down things get much easier. Firstly, because you know who to aim your copy at tone-wise and secondly because you should begin to get a clearer idea of what information people will want to know next.

Try to suspend reality for one moment and imagine that you are not so immersed in the build of your new app that you know every nuance of its character. Imagine that you are your mum, and you have stumbled on a new site called Amigo that has a nice smiley face for a logo. Oooh! nice, tell me more… What does it do? (this is solved by the strap line). Sounds great. Now think - what’s your mum’s next question? It could be ‘how much is it?’ or ‘how does it work?’ or ‘how do I sign up?’ This will be specific to your app.

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