Category Archives: Website design

Your First Website

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The first thing many businesses need is a website. There are loads of ways you can get this set up but, as you’ll probably live with it for a while, it’s better to think it through beforehand.

The option you choose will depend on a number of factors:

  • Budget
  • Your IT skills
  • Your design skills

There is no real substitute for a professionally designed and built website. If you can afford it, this route will give you something that looks distinctive, can be easily updated and will be reliable. It should also give you something that performs well in Google searches.

If money is very tight there are free options with, for example, Googlesites or WordPress.com, which will host a basic website that you put together with their templates. These require only a basic level of IT competence and are very easy to maintain.

A more flexible option is to look at WordPress.org. This gives you much more control over the appearance and functionality of your site and all you need to pay is around £50 per year for a hosting package, and possibly a bit more if you want to purchase a theme to make the appearance more individual. If you are reasonably confident using IT systems and don’t have much budget, this could be a good option. Several professional web-developers use WordPress, particularly for budget sites, so you’ll be in good company.

The advantage of WordPress.org hosted on your own domain is that all of the work you do to optimise your content for Google searches will benefit you directly rather than the host.

Another advantage of WordPress is that it is a blogging platform, giving you almost limitless opportunities to publish content to engage your audience.

Website Content

Unfortunately this is too often an afterthought – a mistake which could make all the money and time you invest in your site a complete waste. Effective website content engages your audience and makes a compelling case for your solution. It is also structured to make everything easy to find -whether through on-site navigation or Google searches. There is a skill involved in achieving this.

If you have a limited budget your website developer might not spend much time explaining the benefits of having professionally written content. This is a shame, as it could be the difference between a site that delivers results and one that doesn’t.

Hopefully you’ll find these pointers useful. Feel free to get in touch if you want a bit more guidance.

 

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Rocket Fuel or 2 Star – What’s Powering Your Website Content?

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Use great content to fuel your websiteCreative Commons License

JD Hancock via Compfight

All too often I find myself talking to business owners whose website has failed to live up to expectations. After a bit of discussion it usually becomes clear that the seeds of failure are in the website content and were sown early on. Typically there are two common ways that website content undermines the impact of small business websites.

Factor 1. DIY Content Creation

I fully understand why people decide to write their own content:

‘It’s an expense I can avoid when money is tight’

‘By the time I’ve explained it all to somebody, I might as well just write it myself’

‘This is a specialist business and I’m the best person to explain how it works.’

All I’ll say is that I have yet to meet somebody who hired a professional copywriter and didn’t think it was a great investment.

Factor 2. Where’s the Website Content Plan?

Often, the original envelope that the website content plan was written on is lost forever – if it ever existed. When you think that your website is your face to the world, something that potential customers will use to make a judgement about whether it’s worth doing business with you, it’s remarkable how little thought often goes in to what businesses want to say. If you’re thinking of creating a website, either for a new business or to replace your existing site, think about the following points.

‘Under Construction’ Pages are pointless.

If you want to establish a web presence quickly, at least put a bit of content up. A single page that says something about what you do and how people can contact you will buy you a little time while you do a proper job on the real website content.

What your Customers Want to Know

Do you understand my needs? Can you meet my needs? Can I trust you to deliver? What do you want me to do? That’s what potential customers are looking for and any content you plan to include needs to be focused on answering these questions. Your content may help customers develop their understanding of what their needs are, and certainly needs to show how you will add value to their life or business, but fundamentally  people are interested in the four questions above. The final question often gets overlooked; don’t expect people to guess what you want them to do. If you want them to fill out a contact form, phone you or complete an on-line quotation form, make it clear.

Every Page has a Purpose

Take a sheet of paper. For each page you are proposing to have on your site, write statements for the following:

  1. The purpose of this page is…
  2. The page is aimed at the following segments of my target market…
  3. My customers will be most interested in, and need to know…
  4. As a result of reading this I want people to understand…
  5. I now want people to…

How Many Pages?

On the one hand you don’t want a dozen pages with hardly any content, this can make navigation tiresome. On the other hand, people won’t scroll through loads of irrelevant stuff to get to the information they want. It’s a balance that needs careful planning. You also want to think about how people will search for your information and how you will optimise your content for search engines. The more diverse your offering and the more market niches you serve, the more pages you are likely to need. You can then optimise the content, page title and tags appropriately, based on the terms that your target customers will use for searches.

After the Site Is Launched – what then?

The final part of your plan needs to focus on how you will keep the site updated as your business evolves. How are you going to keep adding fresh, original content? Search Engine Optimisation is increasingly an ongoing process and not a one-off task. Keeping your site at the top of Google search rankings means you need a plan to keep your website content updated.

I recently heard content described as the fuel for your on-line marketing. Make sure your site is ready for lift-off with some careful planning and plenty of relevant content in the tank.

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The More Your Website Content Pleases You – the Less Effective it Could Be

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Who decides what goes in your website content? You? A select group of senior managers? Delegating the content to a small, focused group of decision makers is great for consistency and efficiency. And possibly the worst decision you could make.

Let me explain.

The purpose of your website is to communicate with the outside world. Write it to please yourself and you’re missing the point. Worse still, you’re probably missing countless sales opportunities too. The people who really understand what needs to be in your website content are your customers – and the staff who are dealing directly with them.

I was recently looking at the website of a company selling telephone and communications systems. The content was clear and gave all the information you could ever want on the capabilities and specifications of the systems they were selling. But I’m willing to bet that such things are not the main reasons why customers choose one service provider over another – particularly when there are dozens of providers who could meet their technical requirements.

Website content is for customers

I’m convinced that a bit of research with existing customers would yield a different story and a different message for the website content. If you understood the critical factors that made your customers choose you over a competitor – wouldn’t you want to emphasize those for anyone else that looks at your site?

And what about your sales team? Every sale - particularly solution sales like IT and  telecoms, will have some critical decision points during the process. Taking the time to analyse and document these before chasing the next sale provides a rich seam of persuasive website and marketing copy. How often does this happen? Yet a relatively simple debriefing process could be all it takes.

One argument for hiring a freelancer to write your web content is that they come to the project with no preconceived ideas about your business. It’s often easier for an external, impartial professional to get to the heart of why people really choose to do business with you.

Good marketing is specific

Say you were looking for an accountant to look after your tax returns. Most of them say ‘we save our clients money by ensuring they claim all their available allowances.’ Another says: ‘On average we save our clients £457 on their tax bill by identifying allowances they didn’t realise they could claim.’

The second is clearly more persuasive. The actual figure is irrelevant (but must be true, obviously). The fact that a specific figure can be quoted adds weight to the claim and differentiates you from the mass of companies making similar claims.

If your product or service saves customers money, find out how much they have saved and make sure you tell anyone else who might be considering doing business with you. Perhaps what you sell is more expensive than your competitors – people may still buy from you because you provide better overall value. If so, talk to your customers to understand fully what ‘value’ really means to them and build your website content around that message.

A final thought;  phone a couple of recent customers today (or get me to do it for you) and ask them to give a couple of specific reasons why they did business with you. The difference between what they tell you and the message that you are giving on your website is a measure of the opportunity you are missing.

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Think Before You Flash

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How often do you find corporate websites that make it harder than necessary for you to concentrate on the written content? There you are making a genuine attempt to work out what this company does and how it might enrich your life or business, but your eye keeps being drawn away. The source of this distraction? A completely unnecessary Flash animation either in the mast-head or somewhere on the page.

Think for a moment about portal sites and message boards. These virtually always have little adverts popping up all around the screen. These are dynamic because that movement is designed to distract your eye from what you want to read on to what somebody else wants you to read. Fair enough; but why would you want to distract your own customers in this way?

There are still companies and web designers who seem to be married to using animations seemingly ‘to show that we can’, or because they like the technology. But if you think about the people visiting your site and how you want them to interact with it, animations may not always add to their enjoyment or satisfaction.

Animations have a place. Even a copywriter like me would accept that some information is communicated more clearly through video or moving graphics. You may even have a particular special offer that you want to make sure they notice. But if these pop up without users requesting them, it can be a bit like an oncoming car flashing its headlights for no apparent reason.

Your website should be putting across a message. Design and content need to work sympathetically to maximise the impact of this message. If you distract your readers with gimmicks – no matter how clever- don’t be surprised if they give up in frustration.

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A Gallery Without Pictures

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Imagine this: a new art gallery opens in your town and a conversation with the Director goes something like the following:

‘It’s a fantastic facility, totally state of the art, climate controlled, interactive, specially designed lighting to mimic the unique lighting experienced in Newlyn. And built with sustainable technology to have a carbon footprint the size of a sparrow.’

‘Yes, it’s certainly an impressive building – but I can’t help noticing there aren’t many pictures.’

‘Well no. I’ll be honest with you we got a bit carried away with the building and quite forgot about any exhibits.  But it still looks fantastic doesn’t it?  Anyway, the team rallied round and knocked out a few drawings to fill up some of the space. And Mavis kindly donated her picture of Dawlish seafront made from different pasta shapes – good isn’t it?’

OK, obviously I made this up. But, in truth, it’s not much different to how many businesses treat their websites; prepared to spend on impressive looking design, technical wizardry and so on, but not giving enough consideration to what they are going to fill it with.

Content matters. You could argue that content – or your message – is the whole point of the site.  The site itself is just a means of carrying that message and displaying it to maximum effect. Content should be much more than an afterthought – it is the starting point for truly effective websites.

How long would you spend in a gallery without pictures? How long do you think people will spend on your website if what they find there is poorly written and not very interesting?

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What Does A Copywriter Do?

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This is a question I often get asked at business networking events.  Sometimes this is followed by me clarifying that it is nothing to do with intellectual property.  Copywriting and copyright – not the same thing but an understandable confusion, I suppose.

This type of confusion may explain why the difference that a professional Copywriter can make to your business is not always fully appreciated.  People rarely question the value of hiring a Web Designer – they self-evidently have technical and creative skills that smaller businesses often lack.  But writing seems to be different.

Business owners and leaders have a detailed understanding of what their businesses do.  And, because we all learn to write at school, putting that understanding together as the content for the website or corporate brochure isn’t something they feel they need to pay somebody to do.

There are a couple of problems here.  The first is time.  Many Designers I have spoken to express frustration that customers who generate their own copy usually struggle to find time to put content together alongside their other responsibilities.  Deadlines get compressed and quality suffers as a result.

More importantly, however, a professional will do the job better. It is often easy to spot websites where companies have produced their own copy.  Assuming there are no spelling and grammar mistakes (not always the case, sadly), content is often quite a long description of everything that the company does.

Often, the first thing a Copywriter does is decide what doesn’t need to be written at all.  Any publication or website needs a clear purpose and message – anything not directly related to that is just clutter.  A Copywriter will work with you to identify the critical messages about your business.  A Copywriter will also try to look at your products or services through your customers’ eyes: what benefits and selling points are going to address their issues? What language will they find compelling?

Providing information and communicating are not the same thing.  Communication is about organising information and using language in a way that enhances the reader’s understanding and inspires them to do something.  This is the essence of what a Copywriter does.

To paraphrase Eric Morecambe: we use the right words in the right order to help organisations improve their sales and performance.  Put like that, it doesn’t seem quite so dispensable, does it?

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Try the five second test on your website

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A quick question: If you had 5 seconds to tell me something truly unique about your business, what would you say?

Take 5 seconds to improve your business results

Now, go look at your website and tell me how long it would take for me to find that same piece of information.

Website content should not be there to tell us that surveyors survey buildings, accountants produce accounts, or car dealers sell cars.  We can all work that out for ourselves.

What we want to know is what is special about what you make or sell, and why we need to get it from you as opposed to anyone else.

And why five seconds?  That’s probably all the time your website content has to tell me something compelling after I open your home page before I lose interest.

So if you want to do one thing to improve the way your website works – try my simple five second test.

 

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Short and Snappy Makes Web Users Happy

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I think it’s well accepted that people read websites differently from traditional printed documents.  But what are the main differences?  And how should these affect the way you write web content?

The most obvious difference is that most people scan web pages rather trying to read every word.  So rule one is to make key information not just easy to find, but almost impossible to ignore!  

Think where your eye went when you opened this post – did it go to the bold, underlined text above?

Judicious use of bold text for important words and phrases will help you to attract the reader’s eye where you want it to go.  But don’t overdo it – too may elements calling for attention will only confuse people.

Bullet Lists

Where possible put important information into bullet lists – particularly the benefits of the product or service you are describing.  Make each bullet point short and snappy.  People often only read the first couple of words in each one, so aim for about that number – or at least make sure you put the important words first.

Sub headings also help. I bet your eye found the one above the previous paragraph.

Concise

Effective web copy has to be concise.  Don’t try to get two ideas into a paragraph because people won’t get to the second one.

Also, aim for half or less of the amount of copy that you would use for a printed document. This takes real discipline.  You have so much you want to say about all the great things you can do for your customers – try to put it all in and they will probably read none of it.

Hopefully, the page you are writing will have a well defined purpose.  You should be clear in your mind what you want or expect readers to do next; make sure that your copy leads them naturally to this decision and try to exclude anything that does not flow towards that next step.  Flow is the critical word here – you have to be subtle.

Don’t Oversell

What surprises many people is that overt marketing language can be a barrier between your message and your audience.  Claiming to be the best in the world or having the lowest prices anywhere is likely to make your readers a little cynical.  Also, they will have to evaluate the reliability of that message before concentrating on what you really need them to know.  Striking a balance between positive, benefits-led copy and marketing hype is not easy.  But getting it wrong could make everything you have invested in your website a waste of time and money.

Eye Tracking

If you want to get really technical you can read various reports into eye-tracking research. These studies track how people’s eyes move over a web page on screen and produce a map of where they spend most time.  These studies reinforce all of the points above. They also suggest that there is an F shaped pattern to many interactions.

Readers tend to read horizontally across the top first (suggesting that horizontal navigation bars can be an advantage).  They then scan vertically down the left hand side, looking for anything eye-catching before going across, usually a couple of times.  Finally they scan down the left hand side of the rest of the page.

I wouldn’t get too bogged worrying about the technicalities of eye tracking but it can help sometimes to have this F shaped pattern in mind when positioning critical information. On the other hand, being concise, reasonably objective and thinking about how your page can be scanned effectively should be things you think about every time you write a page for the web.

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Why Bother with a Website?

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A decent website usually represents a significant investment for a small or medium sized business and it’s pretty hard to get by these days without an on-line presence.  But I wonder how many opportunities are missed for the sake of a bit of thought about what exactly you need a website for and how it fits into a broader marketing strategy.

‘We need a website to explain what we do,’  seems to be a common reason based on the amount of information that many companies try to pack in.  And it may be that what you do is so self-evidently unique and valuable that just describing it will have customers queuing around the block. Most businesses, however, have a website as part of a mixed marketing strategy - consciously or unconsciously.  So it’s worth asking a few basic questions before designing your new site or to review the effectiveness of what you already have up on the web.

1. Where will my website traffic come from?

Will it be from people typing certain search words into a search engine? Will it be people responding to direct mail?  Will it be people attracted through networking and social media?  All of these would come to your site with different levels of pre-existing knowledge and looking for something different, which may well affect the information you want to put on your site.

2. What type of business are we – and what does this mean for planning our web content?

If you are mainly an e-commerce business people are likely to want to get straight to the products.  A service business will need to think very carefully about the site structure and content.  Service businesses are unlikely to be selling directly through the website, so think about the various stages in the sales process where potential customers will be accessing the site – are they going to find something that will take them to the next stage?  It will pay to do some research with existing customers to make sense of this.

3. What do we want the website to say about us?

Spend a few minutes with your team to capture all of the things that are great about your business.  Would customers get the message about your strengths by looking at your website?  Think carefully about cutting out everything on your website that is not related to these key messages.  If you must have some detailed descriptions of things that you do then think about using sub-pages and hyper-links.  On-line publishing has the great advantage of not having to have every piece of information in a continuous narrative – make it easy to access additional information but don’t let it clutter up your message.  A useful image here might be Michaelangelo’s description of the work of a sculptor: “A piece of stone contains a statue – it is my job to remove everything that is not the statue.”

4. Does the copywriting reflect who we are?

Vocabulary. Adjectives in particular.  Are the words you use appropriate for your business?  Are you streamlined, efficient, caring, meticulous, creative, traditional, innovative, off-beat, fast, methodical, technical, trustworthy…? Have a think about it and check you are using the appropriate words to reinforce the impression you want to create.

Successful businesses know exactly what they want from their website and make sure that it is designed and written to produce exactly those results.

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