At some point in most projects I’ll ask you to write the words that go on your website, and a fair few people are surprised by that. They assumed it came with the build, in the way the design does.
Here’s the thinking, and then the part where I tell you what to do if writing genuinely isn’t your thing, because for a lot of people it isn’t.
You know things I don’t
You know which treatment people are nervous about asking the price of. You know the question every new member asks before they turn up for the first time. You know that half your enquiries start with somebody’s neighbour recommending you, and that they arrive already half sold, needing reassurance rather than persuasion.
I can learn some of that. I can’t learn all of it in the time a website takes, and copy written by somebody who has never met your customers reads exactly like copy written by somebody who has never met your customers. It’s smooth, it’s perfectly grammatical, and it says nothing that anyone couldn’t have said about a business down the road.
The specifics are what sell. They’re also the only part of this that has to come from you.
What I’m actually asking for
Not writing in the literary sense. No introductions, no building to a point, no “here at Smith and Sons we pride ourselves on”.
Just answer the questions somebody would ask you if they were standing in front of you. What do you do. Who is it for. What does it cost, or why can’t you say. What happens after they get in touch. What makes you different from the two other places they’re looking at, said plainly rather than modestly.
Write it in an email to me, badly, in one sitting, without going back over it. Rough and specific is worth more than smooth and vague, and the tidying is the easy part.
The honest bit about timing
Content is the reason most website projects run late. Not the build.
It isn’t laziness. It’s that writing your own copy lands on the list of somebody who already has a job, underneath everything with a customer attached to it, and it stays there. Meanwhile the site sits at ninety percent finished, which is the most annoying possible state for it to be in.
In fairness, I have never once received the final copy for a website before the site was nearly finished. Nine times out of ten there are tweaks after it arrives, and every so often those tweaks mean redesigning a page, or two, so the new words sit properly instead of looking like they were posted through the letterbox.
That isn’t a complaint. It’s just how it goes, and I plan for it now. But it does mean that copy arriving very late costs more than copy arriving late, because by then there’s a design for it to fit into.
So if you know, honestly, that this is going to sit on your list for three months, say so at the start. It changes how we plan it rather than causing a problem.
If writing isn’t your thing
Then don’t force it, and don’t let it hold the whole project up.
I work with a small number of copywriters I trust, and I’m happy to introduce you. It’s a real cost and worth putting in the budget from the beginning rather than discovering halfway through, but it is a good deal less expensive than a website that sits unfinished for half a year.
What that usually looks like: they talk to you for an hour or so, ask the questions I listed above and a few better ones, and go away and write it. You still supply the knowledge. Somebody else supplies the sentences. That’s a perfectly respectable division of labour, and the result is a great deal better than copy squeezed out reluctantly at eleven at night because the developer keeps asking.
To be clear about the arrangement, because it matters: it’s an introduction and nothing else. You’d deal with them directly and they’d invoice you directly. There’s no cut in it for me. I’d rather have a project that’s moving than a slice of somebody else’s fee.
Just tell me which one it is
Whichever way you want to do it, say so at the start rather than at the end.
I would far rather hear “I am never going to write this” in week one than work it out for myself somewhere around week fourteen, by which point we are both being very polite about whose turn it is.