Website home page copy – revisiting the basics
Image by Gerd Altmann from Pixabay
Does your website home page have the right amount of copy, that says the right things, addressed to the right audience?
I blame UX.
The World Wide Web has been around since 1989. And still, most website owners don’t get it.
Whether you’re surfing on a huge desktop monitor or a smartphone, it’s not easy to find a site that engages visitors as well as it might.
The issue begins with the home page. Most have far too much copy. Or too little.
You only have a moment to engage people when they visit your home page. You don’t know if they’re familiar with your company. You have to assume they’re not.
Your home page, therefore, needs to concisely answer the visitor’s two primary questions:
Who are you?
What can you do for me?
Answering only one of these isn’t good enough.
If you just go on about your company’s identity, what you do and what you believe, the visitor will think ‘So?’ and then ‘So what?’
If you just talk about what you claim you can do for the visitor, they’ll be sceptical. They’ll ask, who are you to make such promises? What are your credentials? How can you know what I want and need?
You have to answer both primary questions, quickly, to the visitor’s satisfaction. And you have no more than a paragraph or two, at this stage, to do it.
Only then can you take the visitor forward towards your eventual call to action.
‘Who are you?’
The first primary question is critical.
Who are you? What do you do? What are your primary products or services? What makes you different in your industry?
Let’s say your company is a firm of accountants. You could write something like:
Slurrett & Bunny is Sydney’s innovative accounting firm.
We’re human. We understand. We help.
At a glance, the visitor can see that Slurrett & Bunny provides accounting services (presumably of a general nature). The firm is located in Sydney, Australia. Its attitude is one of innovation and warm, human approachability.
That’s enough.
‘What can you do for me?’
The second primary question prompts you to identify your target audience. Describe the benefits you provide to this audience. How can you be useful? How can you solve your visitor’s problem?
[Note: it’s sometimes more effective if your answer to this question appears on the page ahead of your answer to the other one. Experiment with the order to see which works best.]
Back to Slurrett & Bunny. The firm’s home page might say:
If you’re a business owner, we can help you make the best financial decisions that enable your enterprise to grow and prosper.
If you’re a full-time employee, we can help you streamline your finances, fulfil your tax obligations and plan for your future.
This shows that Slurrett & Bunny’s target audience comprises small businesses and individuals. The firm helps the members of each segment achieve specific benefits.
You don’t need much more than this.
What other copy do you require?
Only after you’ve answered the two primary questions should you consider including other copy on your home page, such as:
a main headline (which is the subject of a whole other article – suffice to say your headline should directly reflect your answers to the two primary questions)
specific sales offers
news
introductions to specific services, people or locations
introductions to articles, case studies and resources (these integrate with your content marketing / social media engagement strategy)
testimonials.
As a rule, however, less is generally more on a home page. Only include additional copy if it supports your key messages, and doesn’t distract.
Your main task is to make it easy for visitors to progress quickly and logically to the more specific, detailed, relevant content they require on subsequent pages. From there you can help them transition seamlessly to your call to action.
The problem with UX
So why do I believe the rise of the UX discipline has contributed, at least partly, to the proliferation of ineffective home pages?
Here are four reasons:
UX is essentially a design function (even though its proponents will often say it’s much more than this). Copy takes a back seat.
UX design specialists tend to operate based on inherently false anti-copy principles, the primary one being that ‘people don’t read digital content – they only scan’.
Website owners and developers usually approach UX specialists first to help them produce or revise their sites. Only afterwards is the digital copywriter asked to ‘just fill in the allocated spaces’ with a specified number of words or even characters, long after the information architecture and wireframes have been created and approved.
UX advocates often argue that the home page is not the most important or most visited page on a website. In some cases, this is true. In most cases, it’s not. However, this belief can lead to neglect of the home page and the copy it contains.
With the phenomenal influence of Steve Jobs and Apple over the past 30 years, the tech community has come to assume that intuitive design is the answer to almost any problem. That’s why UX practitioners believe they can ‘design’ copy.
Such an approach, however, places the cart before the horse. Design and copywriting are distinct, complementary disciplines.
When a content strategist and/or copywriter is involved before, or at least at the same time as, the UX specialist, the resulting home page (and, in fact, the whole site) invariably succeeds at a much higher level.
As designer Jeffrey Zeldman acknowledges, “Content precedes design. Design in the absence of content is not design, it’s decoration.”
When you need help with website copy, please contact me any time.