The subject of today’s post centres on a subject the importance of which is often overlooked, ignored or completely dismissed by website owners – website copy!
Many businesses commissioning new websites take the view that hiring a professional copywriter is an unnecessary expense and prefer instead to concentrate their efforts and budgets solely on the website itself.
There are others who fancy themselves as wordsmiths and compose their own copy, and to be fair, some of them are more than capable – but not many.
It’s not about being able to string a sentence together or using clichéd sales speak and jargon or simply a case of putting some hastily written words on a site and thinking that visitors will be so impressed they will immediately want to do business – it doesn’t work that way.
Effective copy should talk to visitors, inform them, engage and interest them and persuade them to take a desired course of action and copywriters have a better understanding than most of what it takes to do that.
It’s often said that a website has only seconds to capture a visitor’s attention and it’s the immediate look of the website that has to achieve this, but once that task is completed and the visitor has decided to stay and learn more, the copy is the next stop, and if it isn’t up to scratch all that good design work is wasted.
Good copy is as vital to the success of a website as is the design itself and the two can’t be divorced from each other without affecting that success. Any business commissioning a new website and even those with existing sites should seriously consider the benefits of using a professional copywriter.
As I said earlier, many businesses see copywriting services as an unnecessary expense and possibly something they’ll never change their opinions on which is their choice of course. I like to think that the more enlightened see it as an investment.
Until next time.
