Website Words Before Website Design
Website words written before website design saves you from a lovely box built round an empty room.
Website words written before website design saves you from a lovely box built round an empty room.
Your website is loud in the wrong place The welcome sits up top in a font fit for a wedding invitation, while what you treat waits three scrolls down, patient as a kettle nobody's switched on. Write the words first and the design has something to hold.
Try it now. Put your hand over the first screen of your homepage and read only what's left.
Usually it's a stock photograph of a woman laughing at a salad. Underneath, if you're lucky, sits one plain sentence about the shoulder pain you fix.
What you treat should sit at the top, not filed under a welcome message, the way you wouldn't hide the kettle in the airing cupboard.
The homepage exists to name the problem fast, before anyone's finished admiring the font.
Wellness marketing guides: practical guidance on this topic:
Resonant issues: challenges nearby to this:
The welcome can wait. The shoulder can't.
Designers are marvellous at boxes. Give them a paragraph and they'll frame it beautifully, like a good mount round a photo of the dog.
Give them nothing and they still build the box. Only now it's round an empty room, all cornicing and no furniture.
Words go first because the story dictates the shape. Hand over your sentences before you hand over your brand colours.
The design serves the sentence, never the other way round.
You wrote the treatment plan before you bought the couch cushions. Same principle, different room.
Here's a figure to chew on slowly, like toffee: owner revenue share is negatively correlated with total practice revenue, at r=-0.61.
Put plainly, the owners taking the smaller slice for themselves tend to be running the bigger operations.
A homepage that only ever says 'me, me, my hands, my twenty years' might be capping the whole practice without you clocking it.
The words that talk about clients, and their results, do more work than they look like they're doing.
The page fixed on you personally has a ceiling. The page fixed on them doesn't.
Nobody has booked a soft tissue massage because a website called it 'a passage of transformative wellbeing.'
They booked it because their shoulder hurt like a trapped nerve in a deckchair. The page said so, plainly, near the top.
Plain words outperform lovely words every time a client is in genuine discomfort and scrolling on their phone in a car park.
Say the ache. Say the fix. Save the poetry for your Christmas cards.
Read your homepage aloud, on any ordinary weekday, to a visitor who has never had a treatment in their life. A neighbour will do. So will a plumber.
If they can't name what you do by the end of the first paragraph, the words turned up after the design did, in a rush, apologising.
Clarity in the first paragraph is not a nicety, it's the whole job of the page.
You'll know it's failed when your neighbour says, kindly, 'so is it like a spa, or...'
Front of mind: some of our thinking on this topic:
Doing your own copy properly means returning to it every few months, the way you'd re-season a cast iron pan.
You don't throw the pan out. You give it a wipe, a bit of oil, ten minutes on the heat.
Bringing a copywriter in to write it is its own kind of upkeep. It's the same instinct that calls a plumber, same as calling a plumber to fit a tap instead of teaching yourself to solder.
Somebody has to keep touching the words, or they go the way of unloved cast iron: rusty, and faintly embarrassing at a dinner party.
One page on your site earns its keep in the corner, unnoticed, like the one radiator that gets properly hot.
You probably haven't checked which. Most people check the page they're proudest of instead, and that's rarely the same page.
Look at what people read right before they ring you, not what you'd choose to show your mother.
The booking data tells you more than your own taste ever will.
A woman once told me her physio's website had four fonts on it, two of them cursive, arranged like a ransom note written by a client with strong opinions.
She booked anyway. The booking button worked, and the paragraph above it told her, without ceremony, that they treated her exact problem.
Good words fix what design can't cover for. That's everything that happens after a visitor finishes reading.
Words get the booking. Fonts just get noticed.
The fonts embarrassed her. The words got her booked in. Only one of those mattered by the following week.
Design gets you noticed. Words get you rung.
Get the words sorted before another designer builds you a beautiful box round an empty room. Sort your words first
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