Copy-first promotional website design

I’ve been working on a few promotional “brochureware” website developments and redevelopments recently. Small clients, a range of tech and non-tech businesses, some decades old, some brand new, none of them aiming for direct sales through their sites.

The results have been positive. But while my recent clients are open to being convinced that copy matters, many are not; moreover, many people in our industry itself still don’t get it. I see it all the time.

In so many cases, despite the web and what are effectively brochureware websites having been around for, oh, twenty years plus, our industry proper still seems to have no real idea what it’s doing when it comes to making them.

Copy-first design is a popular phrase and a nice idea that is in my experience practiced by almost no one. When did you last hear someone say, “We need a new website. Let’s find a good writer!”?

Brochureware websites (like books and tv) are, first and foremost, visual media. So most brands still put their futures in the hands of designers to do the things designers do, and eventually the copywriter is brought on board to fill the gaps in the wireframes with words. Still. Today. In 2020.

If your copywriter is literally just a person with a keyboard and an idea of how words make sentences, then perhaps that’s all they can do. But if you have a copywriter with any modicum of actual capability, you should be starting with that person.

Before the brief

A website is a communication between your brand and your audience. Do you know what you brand is? What it stands for? On which levels it connects with people? How it sounds when it talks?

If not, a web copywriter is going to help you find those threads and pull them together into some kind of collection of useful branding elements that any creative can use to produce work for your brand. Can’t a designer do that, though? In my experience, no, not alone.

A good copywriter has an edge over everyone else in the room on this stuff, and it’s this: good copywriters tend to be good talkers. They are able to express things clearly in spoken English as well as written English.

So if you’re meeting to discuss the brand or the website, they have a critical role. While the designers are going to have great ideas, and so are the brand stakeholders and business people, the writer, more often than not, is going to be immediately able to reframe someone’s fumbled, “this isn’t right, but something like…” suggestions into ideas that the whole team can grasp, interrogate, and agree on. If there’s disagreement, the writer will be able to isolate concepts and ideas, and reposition them in words until the group does agree. Whether you’re doing brand work in a workshop or Google Docs, the writer is key.

So what now? We’ve got a sense of the brand’s value proposition and some idea of its values or purpose, and perhaps tone of voice. Hopefully, from the design perspective, you can give some direction on colours, fonts, and visual styles. Bottom line: you have some brand documentation now. It might seem like the perfect time to turn the project over to the designer to wireframe the pages.

Again, friend, no. Text isn’t just about communicating information; it needs to connect on sentiment.

Creating connection

When we talk to real humans in real life, we automatically adjust our speech to the moment, based on how we perceive our interlocutor: their personality, mood, needs, goals, motivations, degree of power, desire for an ongoing relationship, and more. Of course, all that stuff comes into play from our side, too. So we adjust what we’re saying constantly, word after word, sentence after sentence, as we speak and perceive their reactions and responses, using whatever resources (language, voice, breath, gesture, touch, posture, space) we have available to us.

Every human communication has a social purpose, and we use our full faculties to achieve those goals when we communicate in speech. When it comes to writing, we lose the non-linguistic features of speech, but we still want to be able to connect emotionally, since, after all, that’s how relationships are made and, given the nature of capitalist competition, it makes the best kind of sense to create an emotional motivation to get someone to connect with your business.

The thing is that, as well as the characteristics of our audience, our personalities guide the way we present stories and information to people.

So the next step in your new website development is to work out how you will say whatever it is you want to communicate.

This isn’t just a simple matter of word selection; it starts with the communications goal and the overall structure of the message. It includes sub-messages you need to communicate under each key message. It involves making sure the messages are accessible not just in a linear format (the scrolled page) but as pieces that are jumped between, because after all, this isn’t a line of conversation; this is a website controlled not by the “speaker”, but by the “listener”: the person using it.

What if your site is almost all imagery? The thing I just said applies just as much. This is about conceptualising how to tell a story that communicates what your brand needs it to, even though you cannot really control how the “listener” “hears” it. Web copywriters, being both language and digital communications experts, are adept at this.

Theme, story and messaging

So the next step is structure and messaging. I personally like to come up with a “theme” too: a guiding principal that, if this were a novel, would be the emotional “lesson learnt”.

The practical lesson learnt for a horse-riding academy site — which is always aligned with the unique selling proposition — may be something like:

Jo’s riding school is the most trusted, safe, high-quality riding instruction centre in the district.

The theme, or emotional takeaway from the website, might be:

Love riding for life.

Now, maybe the messaging on the home page is going to cover those three points: trusted, safe, high-quality. Anyone in the business could come up with that. Then they decide to use testimonials to reflect “trusted” and awards or teacher profiles to communicate “high-quality”. Maybe there’s a certification they’ll mention under “safe”.

Anyone with a pencil can wire frame all this out with Lorem Ipsum, but we’re still talking solely in facts. How will this communication meet the emotional “lesson learnt”?

Guy, you’re gonna need something else in there, and believe me, it’s not a nifty tagline or a snappy intro para. It’s not just about which words replace the Lorem Ipsum.

The copywriter needs to map out how the story will work as I said above: with key messages and sub-messages that lead somewhere, that culminate in an end point that serves to achieve the brand’s objectives for the website — which, as I said, requires an emotional connection. Then, which facts will be included outright? Which ones implied? Which ones omitted? The copywriter makes these decisions (which the client will obviously approve or otherwise) in the process of piecing together a coherent, successful story for the target audience.

Now, as that person plans the on-page messages and the relationships between them, they may well have ideas about how they might be visually supported (since things like proximity and size are going to influence the message too, and visuals can reduce what we need to say overtly in the text). This is where the designer and writer need to work together, to take the messages and see how they can be rendered in a way that’s most meaningful to the audience. In my experience, this applies whether you’re promoting a riding school or an enterprise B2B platform.

In the process, the copywriter is likely to identify key terminology that’s indispensable to your brand and to the communications goals you’ve set. Writers work with words. They’ll be thinking about whether those words need to be included in highly visible headlines; they’ll be considering alternative expressions; they’ll be pondering what to include in meta data; you name it, they’re doing it. This stuff matters to how your messages are received, so whatever is agreed on by the copywriter and the business, the designer, I suggest, kind of needs to make it work — not the other way around.

Say what you need to say, not what looks good

If you initially set out space for three highlights and the copywriter’s decided you need four to tell the story, you probably need four! If you discuss it and agree, then the design needs adjusting! It’s just what it is! Do it and move on! Don’t get upset about how “now the balance is off” or “the headline’s too short”: those are design problems that need to be solved in order to communicate effectively with the audience. Making the thing work visually is what the designer is there for, right? Not dictating the number of benefits you can say your product delivers so you don’t mess up the design.*

Once everyone understands how the story will fall out across your web page or pages, then you can get to the design and copy detail. It’s the nitty gritty, and its here that the writer applies their linguistic skills to communicate all of:
- your brand personality
- the theme for the website
- all relevant factual information
…in your brand’s tone of voice, in line with the messaging plan, and all in service of your communications goals.

That will likely include suggestions for styles that affect the way things are presented. For example, I just recommended sentence-case titles on a website because of they usually appear more approachable than formal title-case titles, and the brand is very down-to-earth. I’m actually reconsidering this now for a few different reasons, and I’m about to go back to the designer to discuss.

After this there’s amendments and proofing — but you know the story from here; it’s what people expect of copywriters. I hope this discussion has shed some light on what a copy-first brochureware web design process can look like, though. And I welcome your thoughts and ideas, whatever your role in these kinds of projects might be.

*If you’re a designer who’s horrified by this suggestion I’m here to tell you that plenty of your peers still argue about this kind of stuff.