By following these guidelines you, too, can make web sites great again
You know what's hard? Writing. You know what's harder than that? Writing online. I mean, Steve Krug says to “Get rid of half the words on each page, then get rid of half of what’s left.” Pffft, easy! Anybody can delete stuff. Figuring out which stuff to delete, however, that's another matter.
But we copywriters need to commit words to paper and bits to screen to get paid. And since nobody needs any more lame web sites, I've prepared these five simple lessons on what makes for great web copy:
Words come first
Teaching is selling
Humor goes a long way
Invest your humanity
Show, don't tell
I've also helpfully illustrated below each lesson several of the ways I've done a bunch of those things in my professional career, which is in no way self-serving (by which I mean, is entirely self-serving). Because portfolio-links-on-job-applications-as-faux-writing-guides is the new black.
"Great writing can't be taught, but atrocious writing is entirely preventable"
Words come first
"all Happy Web sites Are Alike; each unhappy web site is unhappy in its own way"
It's taken me more than 15 years of making web sites to learn the seminal lesson of Anna Karenina: whatever other virtues a web site has, what successful ones have in common is the words. If they don't get the words right, it doesn't much matter what else they do well — people won't remember or share it.
"Content is king" has been long dulled through repetition. But just because it's cliché doesn't mean it's wrong; great copy is no accident, which is why it's so rare. And frankly, more important than the visual styling.
To wit: I've been reading Daring Fireball every single day since 2004 and in that time, the author has redesigned the site exactly zero times. The reason I keep coming back? To read the words. Thoughtful web (copy)writers conceive, plan, iterate, and deliver compelling, concise copy on purpose. I mean, I'm guessing the main reason you're reading this is because you thought the Vote Nathan site was silly enough to get you to click this link. Right? It’s the words that convert.
Like a book or a magazine, a web site must be written before it is designed. Could you imagine trying to publish an issue of the NYT if the writers haven’t filed their bylines? Or a book without all the chapters ready? Designers, either themselves or working with a digital copywriter, have to consider the words from the very beginning of the web design process to be successful. Dropping in Lorem Ipsum and worrying about it later never results in a great site. The purpose of design is to communicate, and you need words for that.
But set-it-and-forget-it is no longer enough, either. Customers find sites that people share, and people share content that's interesting or useful. The companies killing it today are the ones treating their web site as a publication, not a brochure site, publishing articles and stories that attract and engage. When published with care and deliberate intention, each entry helps develop the central theme of the brand story.
For businesses, it's the value proposition. For non-profits, the mission; and for startups, the distinguishing characteristics that help them stand out from entrenched incumbents. The most challenging part of all this? Writing and publishing continually, which means developing an editorial strategy, publishing schedule, flexible software, detailed analytics, and a social media engagement plan. All things peripheral to what you think your business is about. But all things a creative copywriter can help you achieve!
An analog fellow in a digital world
I’m pretty old school: all my words and sketches start on paper. And though my title at NMC was interaction designer, my principal role was communication, which means I wrote many tens of thousands of words for sales proposals, client web sites, blog posts, case studies, and the agency’s own marketing site.
I'm happy to describe my design & copy contributions to each. In many cases, I both wrote and designed the words, as well as sometimes introducing fresh new layouts to increase engagement. At right, please find a selection of my greatest hits.
Channeling my inner Ogilvy, I’ve written and designed dozens of printads for long-time clients (I'm frankly amazed at some of the headlines they let me get away with)
Teaching is selling
What do Apple, IKEA, Bass Pro Shops, Saddleback Leather, Git Tower, and Imperial Sugar all have in common?*
Jason Fried said it best in his 2009 bestseller, REWORK: don’t try to out-spend your competitors. Instead, aim to out-teach them and “you’ll form a bond you just don’t get from traditional marketing practices.”
This is the foundation of modern online content marketing, as true today as it was in the 1930s, when David Ogilvy first discovered that educational ads with long copy convert better than short ones that don’t. Why? Because consumers want to be well-informed about their purchases.
When it comes to reading on the web, in general people do it in one of two modes:
Leisurely for entertainment
Scanning with purpose
We're all familiar with the first — that's tracking ESPN for US Open results or Game of Thrones episode reviews or the scathingly true-to-life Horowitz Report. In that mode, I'm in no hurry and I'm expecting to sit and read carefully. But that's not what we're concerned with.
In the latter mode, I have a specific objective in mind — say, I'd like to buy a new bathroom exhaust fan for a tiny house. There are a surprising number of moisture-sucking options out there and since it's a chunk of change, I'd like to make an informed decision about a quiet one, since there's nowhere to hide in ~200 square feet. The web sites that help me learn about what I need to know — durability, warranty, efficacy, value, etc. — are the ones that I'll trust to make a referral. Helping me as a consumer understand what's involved is not only a way to gain credibility but, even more importantly, is how Google directs me to the site in the first place.
A face only a mother could love
Take this pest control company, for example. I mean, you wouldn't expect much useful, engaging, instructive content from such a site. But the Bed Bugs 101 section is better executed than it has any reason to be, as is their comprehensive pest library, which I probably spent 30 minutes reading the first time I visited the site. Thorn succeeds in using education as a vehicle for demonstrating not only its competence in controlling pests, but in guiding web users to its site in the first place by teaching .
Or take Saddleback Leather's Quality Story video series. It describes in detail precisely the efforts involved in making a great leather bag, step by step, from the metal rivets to the source of the leather. Of course, Saddleback's educational magnum opus remains "How to Knock Off a Leather Bag", which, as an educational satire & marketing tool, comprises a masterpiece of the form. In either case, Saddleback exemplifies the "teaching is selling" mantra: after all, they're doing something right, since I'm telling you about them now.
Want to reach more customers and users through education? Why not hire a copywriter with a decade of teaching and public presenting experience?
"I'm gonna science the 💩 out of it"
By teaching the MCAT to many hundreds of Kaplan students over the course of 12 years, I learned the hard way how to translate complex science subjects & test-taking strategies into simple concepts, easy to understand and use. I also got plenty of practice speaking in front of anxious crowds! Both of which come in handy when educating clients about the web. And you can trust me to not to embarrass you at a sales meeting.
In 2005 I was awarded Kaplan's Teacher of the Year Award
for maintaining the highest excellence ratings among all instructors in the southeast
Anybody remember Refresh the Triangle?
In 2009, I first gave a presentation called "Edward Tufte & Information Design for the Web" in Durham, sponsored by a quirky boutique web firm that just opened an office in the area
* Grant me an interview and I'll tell you!
Humor goes a long way
Puns are like publicity: no such thing as a bad one
The best, most memorable and engaging stories are almost always funny. Think: what’s the last link you sent your friend or posted on Facebook? Chances are if it’s not a cat GIF (pronounced “gif”), then it’s probably a clip from the best of The Daily Show, a sublime meta-meme, or a comic from The Oatmeal.
Most people’s first instinct when they laugh is to want to share, so if your goal is exposure for your product, make it easy by making them laugh. When writing web copy, it's OK to have a sense of humor. Again, David Ogilvy: “The best ideas come as jokes. Make your thinking as funny as possible.”
Giving "grammar Nazi" an entirely new meaning
Great, memorable web site almost always feature witty copy or a clever turn of phrase. The goal, as my favorite creative writing teacher used to say, is to be clever without being cute. To me, that implies not settling for the obvious punchline but digging a little deeper; it means appealing to your audience’s intelligence instead of condescending to their lower nature. It’s tough to get right, but you’ll know it when you see it. (My teacher also used to say, “Avoid clichés like the plague,” so grain of salt, and all that.)
My current favorite web copy is written by a company called Meh, which offers daily deals on a single item (that often sells out). If somebody pitched you for investing in that idea for a web site, you'd probably laugh them out of the room. And you wouldn't be wrong. But meh is laughing all the way out of the room... to the bank. A clever combination of witty copy and an active user forum, meh's customer revenue and customer return rate is through the roof. Between its signature "Who's Buying This Crap?" US map data graph and the final image in the product carousel — which always features some delightful surprise — I can't decide which is my favorite thing.
When it comes to the perfect balance of funny and memorable quite, nobody's succeeded quite like Dollar Shave Club, whose eminently silly video you might remember from 2012 when it went ZOMG MEGA VIRAL. CEO Michael Dubin reports that they wrote, filmed, and edited the entire $4500 in a single weekend. Considering that modest sum just scored a billion dollar acquisition by Unilever, a pretty good ROI for the right joke (it also helps to have a great product, natch).
If you want to make great web sites, it helps to have funny words. And if you're looking for a copywriter with a rapist wit, you can count on the one who wrote a whole ridiculous parody site just to land a job.
There's a dearth of affordable office space in Chapel Hill. So in 2011, I wrote, produced, and, um, starred in (?) a video short in the style of a "3am infauxmercial" to promote the development of a coworking space in an empty office on Rosemary St, which the town was considering in collaboration with UNC. That site is now a nationally-renowned incubator, complete with coworking options, and I'd like to think I played a small role!
PEOPLE DON’T BUY WHAT YOU SELL, THEY BUY Why You Sell it
My favorite laywer-turned-typographer, Matthew Butterick put it this way: "Solving problems is the lowest form of design. Investing your humanity is the highest." In other words, the world doesn't need another app to rate your sandwich.
You can measure the success of design along 3 axes:
How well did it solve the problem?
How competently was it executed?
To what extent is the world a better place?
The success of any given design can be plotted along them. Number (1) is about standard success metrics, like increased sales. Craigslist works, but it’s ugly! Number (2) deals with technical excellence but sometimes beautiful designs achieve little. The lovely Path app made a big splash but failed to gain traction because it didn't solve a problem people have.
It's number (3), the rarest and most valuable axis, that keeps our work honest. An idea may score highly along both axes 1 and 2, may be both effective and elegant, but may also be a technology solution in search of a problem. If (1) is the ‘what’ and (2) is the ‘how’, then (3) is the ‘why’: it’s the reason we do good work, the difference we make, the purpose that drives us. And it's all too often missing in the web sites we make.
I still miss Steve Jobs
Of all the products Steve Jobs ever had a hand in creating, surely Apple as an organization is greatest achievement. Rather than developing technology with the goal of trying to create a market, he helped create an organization whose raison d'être is to start with people's needs, with making the world a better place, with a foundation in the humanities — and work backwards to the technology.
He said it best: technology alone is not enough. It’s when the liberal arts intersect technology that we benefit from well-executed, technically excellent, useful designs that make the world a better place. That we benefit from words, design, and products along all 3 axes. It's the difference between work that is merely great and work that improves people's lives and their communities.
Web sites are fundamentally a software product. But they exist, among other things, to deliver words and images with the goal of influencing or educating. The great ones can enrich, inspire, motivate, and encourage. The not-so-great ones can reinforce apparatus of inequality, silence important voices, or perpetuate vacuous frivolity.
But we don't have to make those web sites. When we write words that consider people's needs first — when we invest our humanity to solve problems — we can make web sites great again.
Take a day tripp through downtown Chapel Hill
Back in 2009, I realized that it was the locally-owned businesses — and their quirky proprietors — that made Chapel Hill’s downtown unique. So mostly for for fun I wrote, produced, and directed a short documentary series called “daytripp” in collaboration with my long-time web client and video collaborator DDC International that told the 2-minute story of these retail gems.
By introducing these downtown shops to new patrons, I did my part to prevent a soulless- corporate-franchise-chain takeover of Franklin Street. And got to meet a bunch of interesting people and hone my filmmaking chops in the meantime (The owner of Med Deli, Jamil, was so happy with our work that I didn't have to pay for a meal there for 2 years).
ABAN is a vocational school for young mothers in Ghana that ran a separate business unit and e-commerce store whose sales of handmade Batik products to supported programming & operations.
I designed the logo, print collateral, custom e-commerce web site, and consulted on messaging and technology.
TOPO Distillery
Having mastered the craft beer trade, Top of the Hill expanded in 2013 by opening the southeast's first local, organic distillery. Every ingredient, from grain to glass, is grown or produced within 100 miles.
I designed the bottle labels for each of their signature spirits, as well as the (original) web site, print collateral, display merchandise, and kick-ass "Age Your Own Whiskey" kit (be sure also to watch the short instructional video I made).
Show, don't tell
"Don’t tell me the moon is shining; show me the glint of light on broken glass."
This is the cardinal rule of writing, storytelling, writing, and making great web sites. (I'm thinking maybe I should have led with this. —Ed.) Per Anton Chekhov above, if you want people to think of you as an expert, be an expert by teaching them. If you want people to think you're funny, don't tell them that you are; instead, make them laugh. If you want to show you can make web sites, build one.
Readers are savvy. They demand proof, and they demand pith.
About this topic, there's not much more I can add beyond what Dennis Mahoney has already said. Go read his timeless essay on writing for the web, which is as pertinent now as when he wrote it 14 years ago (!) about this newfangled "blog" business. It may not be a formal education in web writing, but these 1,700 words are about as close as you can get without $50k in student loans:
"Readers crave your anecdotes and stories. They really do. So give 'em the whole megillah. Instead of, 'The party was a riot!' or 'I’m depressed today,' carefully explain why. Elaborate. Parties and depression are perfectly good writing subjects. The Great Gatsby, for instance, has plenty of both.
"Anything makes a good subject, as long as you take your time and crystallize the details, tying them together and actually telling a story, rather than offering a simple list of facts. Do readers really want to know how miserable you are? Yes. But they’re going to want details, the precise odor of your room, why you haven’t showered in a week, or how exactly somebody broke your heart. One–liners won’t suffice."
As for me, I'm trying to follow my own advice. Take this silly guide, for example: I wanted to demonstrate facility in writing, a quick wit, and a decade or so of professional web, writing, & advertising experience. In order to show these things — and not merely describe them — I made a faux-educational guide that doubles as a showcase of my digital oeuvre, so you can inspect my portfolio presented in context of what I consider essential to great copywriting on the web.
Incidentally, do you know anybody looking to hire a good digital native copywriter? Because I know a guy.
Vote Nathan for Copywriter and make web sites great again
