Blue Tide Productions Blog Design, Web, Photography, Video

Creating an intricately beautiful piece of design without perfectly matched copy (text) is like devouring a delicious cookie without a tall, cool glass of milk: excruciating. Don’t let your hard work and long hours go to waste by leaving a bad taste in your audience’s mouth.

Hard-hitting copy on a company’s Web site is especially important, because you want to balance your tone of voice– whether that may be witty, professional, clever, etc. – with the mission of your site.

What is the desired call-to-action? Do you want them to contact you, or simply fill a form for information? Is the site intended for you laugh and then send to friends, or do you want them to buy something directly from the site? Sometimes it’s simply branding your company’s identify or a reiteration of services to remind your clients. If site visitors are not meeting the appropriate call-to-action on the various pages of the site, then your process should be reevaluated.

Copy writing for the site should go hand-in-hand with the design and development process, not as an afterthought.

Few helpful hints to creating content that “wows”:

» Review your sentences and remove the word “that.” In most cases, your sentences still make sense without that word. The more you can condense your sentences and tighten up copy, the better.

»  Finally, an easy way to remember they’re, they’re, and there!:

They are = they’re. Think of it as a drunken slur, you are just running the words together quickly.

So clearly, their = the “other” one, used for possessive. Easy to remember because an “heir” gets stuff. It just has a T in front of it.

And lastly, “there” indicates a location or destination. Also easy to remember because it is like the word “here” (another location/destination) with a T in front of it.

I.e. They’re going to pick up their car from there.

»Alliteration is always an appropriate option. If it rolls off the tongue smoothly, try typing it out and seeing if it also flows well when your eyes move over the text. If I had used words that started with other letters like “Alliteration is typically a reasonable selection,” it just wouldn’t resonate properly.

» Capitalization versus little letters? Depending on the type of site and copy you are crafting, capitalization comes into play in a big way.

The Big Game. A powerful title, needing all caps.

That’s what SHE said. (Self explanatory.)

Eenie,meenie, miney mo…I may choose not to capitalize any of this sentence if I think the viewer will get the ambiguous feeling better without them.

» Keep a thesaurus, dictionary and rhyme dictionary bookmarked at all times. You never know when they will come in handy.

» Always save different versions of your work in progress. The design may transform along the creation process, and some of your carefully written copy may fit perfectly in the final renditions, when it was out of place in earlier drafts.

---

---

Tags: Art and Copy, content, Copy writing, creating content, process, website text

Author: Katrina Priore

This entry was posted on Friday, November 6th, 2009 at 11:05 am and is filed under Tips & Tricks. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.