Martian Designers — 5 Copywriter Peeves | Copywriting in Web Design

Over on Web Depot they ran a couple of excellent posts – Peeves Designers have with Developers and Peeves Developers have with Designers. Now the third and ‘forgotten’ web discipline — copywriting shares its peeves.

Peeve #1 “I’ve finished the bespoke design… just stick the content in”

The design’s done… beautiful graphics pop and the user interface is so slick you could play air hockey on it. So all that’s left is to stick the content in.

Issue

Designers have a tendency to focus on the design itself — bells and whistles are duly added, layout and graphic decisions based on what’s best for the design. The needs of the content become secondary. So, regardless of any talk about ‘bespoke’, what you end up with is a template that imposes restrictions on the content rather than setting it free.

The finished website isn’t maximising the value of its content, maybe even devaluing it. And it’s all too easy for the design to take over.

Solution

Start with high-quality content. From the right structure, layout and navigation to knowing where to put emphasis, whitespace and visual cues… it all starts with the content. Design should progressively enhance content. Every line of CSS, HTML tag, id or class should be ‘justified’ by the needs of the content. As should non-content graphics and functionality.

Take this advice from the Mad Hatter in Alice in Wonderland:

‘Start at the beginning, and when you get to the end, stop.’

Peeve #2 “People these days can’t read for more than 4 seconds”

We all know this one… internet users today have attention spans that would embarrass a goldfish. So designers create visual treats with no more room for copy than you’d find on the back of a postcard.

Issue

The most effective website is one that sells. Be that selling a product, service or even an idea… the purpose is to get a response from the visitor. For most websites it’s web copy that engages visitors and gets a response.

The perfect amount of copy is whatever gets results, often it’s long copy that outperforms short. Arbitrarily limiting copy to anorexic proportions will blunt its effectiveness — it’s design done backwards.

Solution

Get as much content as possible before starting the design. Working with a copywriter from the beginning — designers/ developers will still be designing/ developing and making the design choices, but based on high-quality, effective copy.

Starting with well-written copy answers many design questions:

How best to communicate the client’s message, to engage visitors and lead them deeper into the site towards a strong call-to-action? How best to structure the content? What should be said and what left out, how many pages are needed and what sales funnels set up? What needs focus, what’s the optimal layout and structure for readability and SEO? etc.

Peeve #3 “Oh I’ve done the branding… here’s the logo”

Image is everything as they say. But image isn’t the same as images. It’s truly amazing how often a conversation on branding becomes one about logos.

Issue

A logo is a useful graphical shorthand but it isn’t the full story. Your ‘brand’ is how you’re perceived — your reputation, your credibility and how your audience feels about you. It’s what people are saying about you. And it’s what you are saying about yourself.

Solution

Before people become customers and can judge your actions, it’s your words that must convince them you can be trusted to meet their needs. Yes, looking the part is important, but what you say and how you say things are vital.

Tone-of-voice, word choice, punchy headlines, humour, creative descriptions, the promises you make, the facts you present… successful modern brands are ones that create vivid personalities that people can relate to, trust and, best of all, have a conversation with.

Building a strong brand takes copy and design working in harmony. And that takes copywriters and designers working in harmony.

Peeve #4 “The design’s optimised for search engines just add your content”

As Google and SEO professionals will tell you, high-quality content is the key to SEO. And most content, despite the joys of multimedia, is text. So how can a designer/ developer claim a site is optimised if it’s built on ‘Lorem Ipsum’?

Issue

SEO starts with well-written web copy correctly structured and marked up. Fiddling with meta tags, ‘alt’ text and W3C-validating HTML doesn’t make for an optimised site. And nor does submitting to search engines or directories.

Solution

Search engines index and serve up content, factoring in everything from site architecture and link structure to the relevance and freshness of content. An optimised website is therefore built on optimised content.

An SEO copywriter knows how to create an effective SEO/ sales strategy to target different audiences and searches through targeted landing pages, sales funnels and calls-to-action. It’s this optimised content structure that should dictate the site’s architecture — how many pages, link structure, navigation etc.

Working with an SEO copywriter from the start will enable designers to work with the optimised content that’s essential for search engine success.

Peeve #5 “Photoshop”

The designer creates a stunning work of art in Photoshop. The developer turns it into a smooth-functioning website — it looks great and works just how they planned. So why isn’t the client seeing the money roll in?

Issue

A commercial design, no matter how many design accolades it wins, is a failure if it doesn’t generate business.

I’ve had a look through Photoshop and can’t find the ‘what prospective customers are looking for’ tool or the ever-useful ‘persuasion’ tool. Word is a better choice of software if you want these. Photoshop will let you create an attractive ‘buy now’ button but falls short on the hard work of getting a visitor to click it. This is the job of web copy.

Solution

Good old pencil and paper based on the actual content is a more effective way to start a design. It’s recognised that Photoshopped layouts can cause developers problems if they ignore the needs of real world content, but what about the problems they causes copywriters?

Should they butcher effective sales copy to fit a layout? Should sales funnels cease to flow? Calls-to-action put out of context? Site architecture compromised to fit a nifty navigation system? Crucial copy overshadowed by attention-seeking graphics?

Photoshop is not the first stage of design, it’s the last… start with the perfect content, add the perfect layout and functionality, and then ’skin’ it in Photoshop to maximise its effectiveness.

Bonus peeve “But the client didn’t have the copy ready when I started the design”

I hear this one a lot and it baffles me. Why does this happen in web design?

In other media from marketing to advertising, journalism to graphic design… it’s all about communication design — combining the right words, graphics and layout to get a response. I thought that’s what web design was supposed to be too.

Clients will get better results when designers, developers and copywriters work together from the outset — content, function and form working in harmony.

12 comments/ references for Martian Designers — 5 Copywriter Peeves

Helen — 2 comments

Excellent article!

Prior to learning about copy writing and it’s importance, I would have to coyly say *quiet voice* guilty of a few.

Luke Jones — 1 comment

Fantastic article yet again, John.

Cathy Goodwin — 1 comment

I couldn’t agree more. I wouldn’t call these items “peeves;” I would say they’re more like myths or false beliefs.

I would make an even stronger point about your Bonus Peeve. I think service businesses and independent professionals should start with a copywriter (and many of us are also marketing strategy coaches, because you can’t write good copy without understanding a great strategy).

Copywriters often can save clients thousands of dollars because we know how to talk to web designers. We’ve all had the experience of writing great copy that gets destroyed when the designer uses blue text on a blue background or creates a graphic that so distracting nobody gets the message.

Wizely,
SEO Copywriter

Don’t worry Helen – you’re there now! And thanks Luke I’m glad you liked the article.

I’m with you Cathy on the bonus peeve… I saved the most important until last. Like you say most copywriters come from a marketing background – writing copy/ running marketing campaigns. I know I came into copywriting from this direction after years as a business analyst focused very much on figuring out the right marketing/ sales strategies.

And that’s the big difference. I think it’s fair to say that most web designers/ developers come from an ‘arty’ or technical background, rather than marketing or business strategy.

Rob Mason

Agree with the bonus peeve from first hand experience. It’s soooo much easier designing a site when you know what the client wants to say, what product they have and how they want their customers to behave.

Good work.

Thanks Rob. That bonus peeve could be an entire series of articles… in fact a hefty tome of encyclopaedic proportions! Web designers don’t really like to talk about that one (or copy in general) and it takes an ‘outsider’ to see how mad it is. I really do feel a lot of the time web design clients are ending-up with little more than a template, not a website designed to make their content effective (and I’ve heard something about content being quite the royal patriarch!). Graphics and the latest widgets are all very exciting but they’re not what makes a site effective, they can only help. I suppose it’s because marketing, business analysis and copy are outside the skill set of most designers and, considering they promise the client the world, they never want to admit there’s a hugely valuable part of the site missing from their service!

Scotty

OK I’m a designer and I’m in the huff. You’re deservedly kicking the bad designers and by default the clients who are also suckered by the ‘beautiful graphics that pop and the user interface so slick you could play air hockey on it’ that hides how useless it is. You do good designers a disservice.

Good design should do its job exactly the same as you claim good copywriting does, the slick look if required is almost a byproduct. What about finding the fantastic read but no function copywriting equivalent of the looks great but doesn’t do anything design? Surely that exists out there too.

Hi Scotty… didn’t mean to do good designers a disservice. Good designers will develop a design that enhances content so none of these peees would apply! Absolutely good design should do the same job as copywriting does and both should work together… I keep saying that! That’s what this article is about.
But I think it’s fair and valid to say that far too many times copy is overlooked by far too many designers.
Good copy that reads well but doesn’t work? There is undoubtedly copy out there that is a fantastic read but doesn’t explicitly get a response… and yep, that would be the equivalent of ‘looks great but doesn’t work’.
This isn’t anti-designer heresy – designers, developers and copywriters all work on websites… the ‘peeves’ between designers/ developers are renowned, I’m just putting the copywriter’s view across.

Rob Web Design Talk

Peeve 1 made my laugh, as I’ve literally just been discussing that at work

We have a trainee graphic designer here who has made a few websites – I constantly comment on the fact she leaves no space at all for the all important content. To me, it’s a perfect example of why graphic designers don’t always make good web designers.

I’m sure she’ll get there – I think sometimes designers (especially when starting out) are so keen to make visual masterpieces and be ‘creative’ and ‘artistic’ they forget that design is about function much more than it’s about art. And the function of most websites is to present content in the most effective way so it can do its job. Does make I chuckle/ weep a little when I see ‘bespoke’ designs that have been created in isolation of the content.

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