Preparing the copy for your website

Why this is the thing that delays projects

Published timelines for web projects all carry the same small print, including ours: they run from the moment content is finalised, not from signature.

That sentence gets read as a formality. It is the single most expensive line in the contract.

Here is how it goes wrong, and it is the same every time. Design and build move quickly because those are the parts under one roof. The site is ready in weeks. Then it waits, because the About text needs a decision from somebody who is travelling, and the product descriptions need three departments to agree. A project quoted at eight weeks lands at five months, and nobody involved did anything wrong.

So the question that most affects your delivery date is not which studio you pick. It is whether the copy exists and who can approve it.

And the copy is not only a scheduling problem, which is the part that gets underestimated. Gartner's research on B2B buying finds that buyers who reach value clarity early in their own research — an explicit understanding of how the thing improves outcomes for their specific role — are twice as likely to end up reporting a high-quality, high-value deal than buyers who had to work it out from a confusing site. The words are not the wrapping on the project. They are a large part of what the project is for.

Write in this order

The order matters more than the writing, because each one makes the next easier.

• What you sell, in one sentence, without adjectives. Not a slogan. The literal thing. If three people in your company write this separately and produce three different answers, stop here and sort that out, because no design fixes it.
• Who it is for, and what they were doing five minutes before they arrived. Searching for a supplier, comparing you against two others, checking whether you are real after a recommendation. Each of those wants a different first screen.
• The three questions you answer on every sales call. These are your real page structure. They are already written, in your inbox and in your own voice, and this is the highest-value hour in the whole process.
• What you want them to do, and what happens next if they do it. "Contact us" is not that. "Tell us what you need and we'll come back within two working days with a scope" is.
• Proof. Clients, numbers, dates, names. This is the part that gets left until last and it is the part that closes.
• Everything else. Team, history, values. Real, useful, and not what decides anything.

How much to write

The most common question and the one that stalls people, usually because they are guessing at a length nobody told them.

Ask for a word count per block before you write a word. Any studio that has designed the pages can give you one, and if they cannot, the pages are not designed yet.

What we send looks like this: headline, up to nine words. Standfirst, thirty to fifty. Section body, a hundred and twenty to two hundred. Card, forty. Then you write to that and it fits.

Without it you write four hundred words for a space that holds a hundred and fifty, somebody cuts it without you, and the sentence that mattered is the one that went. Or you write sixty for a space that needs two hundred, and the page looks unfinished in a way nobody can name.

Who signs it off

Decide this before writing, in a sentence, with a name in it.

Content dies in committee more reliably than anywhere else, because unlike a colour or a layout, everybody feels qualified to have an opinion about words. Four people reviewing a page produces four sets of edits that contradict each other, and the version that ships is the one nobody objected to, which is not the same as the one that works.

One person decides. Others advise. Write it down.

And give the review a deadline in the same breath. "Feedback within three working days" changes a project more than any tool. Every week of waiting is a week of project, and it compounds.

Three habits that make it worse

Writing for the search engine instead of the reader. Repeating a phrase because it is the one people type produces text that a person reads once and distrusts. Write for the reader and let the structure carry the rest. The engine has been able to tell the difference for years.

Describing yourself instead of what happens. "We are a leading provider of integrated solutions" survives because it is safe. Nobody has ever chosen a supplier because of it. What does the client get, by when, and what does it cost them if they get it wrong?

Filling the space. If a section has nothing to say, the answer is to remove the section, not to write around it. Every page has one paragraph everybody skips, and everybody involved knows which one it is.

If you would rather not write it

Perfectly reasonable, and it is often the right call.

It does not remove the work, it moves it. Somebody has to sit with you for an hour or two and get what is in your head onto a page, and you still have to read the result and say whether it is true. That last part cannot be delegated and it is the part clients underestimate.

What does not work is handing over a brochure from 2019 and asking for a website out of it. The brochure was written for a different situation and a reader in a different frame of mind. It is source material, not a draft.

And a warning about the obvious shortcut. Text generated wholesale and pasted in unread reads exactly like what it is, and the reader may not name it but they register it. If you use it, use it to get past the blank page, then rewrite it in your own words with your own examples in it. The examples are the part no tool can supply, and they are the part that does the work.