Who Is Going to Write It

The assumption hiding in the quote

A website quote covers design and build. It frequently does not mention who writes the words, and both parties assume the other is doing it.

The builder assumes the client will supply copy, because clients know their own business. The client assumes copy is part of building a website, because what else would the pages contain.

That misunderstanding surfaces in week four, when the design is ready and there is nothing to put in it. It is the most common reason a project stalls.

Settling it before anybody starts costs one conversation.

The three arrangements

Why the interview version works

Because the difficulty is not writing. It is knowing which of the things you know are worth saying.

You have answered the same customer question four hundred times. To you it is obvious and therefore not worth writing down. To a reader it is the exact information they came for.

Somebody asking you questions hears that answer and recognises it as the page. You would have skipped it.

That is the whole value of the arrangement, and it explains why interviewed copy beats both self-written and remotely-written material for most trades.

What only you can supply

Whoever assembles it, this material has to come from you.

• What a job actually costs, and what makes it vary.
• How long things take, in the terms a customer plans around.
• The question you are asked constantly.
• The mistake you see other people make.
• What you will not do, and why.
• The thing that makes a difficult job difficult.

A page containing three of those is worth more than twenty pages of competent general description, and nobody can invent them on your behalf.

How much writing there actually is

Less than people fear, which is worth knowing before the task becomes a wall.

A five-page site is roughly two thousand words in total. A homepage of two or three hundred, a services page of five hundred, an about page of three hundred, a couple of shorter pages and the contact details.

That is one long afternoon of writing, or two hours of talking to somebody who writes it up.

The reason it stretches to months is not volume. It is that starting is hard and there is no deadline attached, so it moves to next week indefinitely.

A worked example

A plumbing business quoted for a six-page site, with copy left unspecified.

The owner intended to write it himself and genuinely meant to. Seven weeks later he had produced the about page and stalled on services, because describing six services without repeating himself turned out to be harder than expected.

The eventual fix was ninety minutes on the phone. He was asked what each service involved, what it typically cost, how long it took, and what customers usually got wrong about it. That conversation produced more usable material than seven weeks of intending to write.

The copy was drafted in two days, corrected by him in an hour, and the site launched a fortnight later.

The seven weeks cost nothing in money and cost the business two months of not having a website.

What it costs, roughly

Useful for judging whether the line on the quote is reasonable.

Copy for a small business site is usually priced per page or as a block for the site. For five pages, expect it to be a meaningful fraction of the build cost rather than an afterthought, because it is a day or two of somebody's actual work.

If it appears on a quote as a very small figure, that is usually the third arrangement: assembled from your existing material without a conversation. Not dishonest, and worth knowing you are buying.

Against that, weigh the cost of the delay. Two months of not having a website, on a business where the site would produce even one job a month, is the more expensive option by a distance.

Getting the brief right

If somebody else is writing, they need more than your old site.

1. The service list, with what you want more of marked.
2. Recordings or notes from a conversation, not just documents.
3. Two competitor sites and what you think is wrong with them.
4. Your actual prices, even if they will not be published.
5. Anything you legally must or must not say.
6. A sample of how you talk, such as a long email you wrote to a customer.

The last is undervalued. A writer with a genuine example of your voice produces something that sounds like you rather than like a website.

Reviewing a draft properly

The part that goes wrong even when the writing goes well.

Read it as a customer who has never met you, not as the person who supplied the facts. The question is whether it answers what they would ask, not whether it contains everything you told them.

Correct anything factually wrong, immediately and specifically. Do not rewrite for style, because two people writing alternate sentences produces a page in neither voice.

And give the feedback in one pass. Three rounds of small changes over a fortnight costs more than one thorough read.

What to do with the material afterwards, and when to revisit it, follows from the same preparation described in what to have ready before you start.

Frequently asked questions

West Coast Media Solutions Inc. provides web design, web development, hosting, digital marketing, and business consulting to organisations across Canada, drawing on more than twenty-five years in the field.