You’ve found a great design studio. They’ve come up with this awesome concept for a site to market your business. Exciting! They can have it done in just a few weeks, and then your site visitors will see your product or business for the high quality service it is.
But your designer reminds you that, to complete the project and get the site going live, you have to send them through some copy – information about you, your business, and your services. But you’re really busy. So late one night you knock out a few paragraphs for your homepage and a sentence or two about yourself, but you’re really tired and you have lots to do tomorrow. So you just write a sentence about your product or service, add ‘More information coming soon’, and email the document. You can always finish it properly when you’ve got an hour to spare. It’ll do for now.
Wrong.
It sounds crazy, but I’ve seen this on many occasions, and I bet you have too. Sites that are faultlessly designed actually have no useful information on them, although the owner has obviously intended to add in some eventually. I don’t know if they ever got round to it though, because I’ve never visited any of those sites again to check.
It comes back to what I always tell people – you can have a beautiful site, faultlessly programmed, stuffed with cool effects, but if there’s nothing useful to give people, it ain’t gonna get you clients or sell your product.
Also bear in mind that search engines love copy, so you’ll achieve better rankings if there’s actually text in your site that’s relevant to the topic at hand.
So when you set up, or redesign, a website, do make sure it’s all finished before it goes live. Don’t waste time and potential conversions on your intention to do it later, just take the time and get it done, whether you do it yourself or bring in professional help.
Totally agree. You can have the best designer, coder and copywriter on the job, but if the consultancy, strategy and gathering of requirements has not been a) done properly or b) not done by someone with expert understand, then the client is on the way to being delivered a shoddy project. I love working with digital consultants who know what they’re doing and set up a framework for my copy to really succeed. Thanks for the post