An important part of effective website design is ensuring that the user can easily navigate to the page most relevant to their interests. Visual design is undeniably significant here, but the writing is also integral to making that system work. From word choices to the overall structure, Web Copy is a core part of the customer journey. Web Copy are the words that help describe a business to people – you’ll see it welcoming you to a homepage or telling you all “About Us”. With that said, let’s explore the nuances of copy and it helps facilitate an ideal user experience.
As with any representation of your business, it’s important to know who you’re trying to target, so you can communicate in a way that resonates with them. An “Avatar” is kind of the stereotype of your target audience. It’s an amalgamation of all the core traits rolled into a single theoretical person. Most businesses won’t just have a single Avatar, but if you have too many you might lose focus. An Avatar is unlikely to represent any one person exactly, but it’s an important way to zone in on who you’re trying to reach with your products or services.
This extends to copy – different people have different expectations and preferences for what they read. If you’re writing for a website that sells high-end, upmarket products then you’d want to use vocabulary that may appear misplaced or pretentious elsewhere, such as “exquisite” or “decorum.” Likewise, if you’re writing a webpage targeted at children, you’ll need to lower its reading level to properly engage with them. These are fairly specific examples, and most Avatars will be more generalised. In all cases it’s important to write with clarity to keep the customer journey seamless.
While different pages have different levels of importance, all areas of a website should serve a purpose. This, coupled with a generally short attention span for web content, means that copy should be concise and informative. You don’t have the time to meander, and superfluous content should only exist to support specific brand images that demand it. It’s important to keep text broken up into easily-consumable chunks, and to ensure that individual pages don’t overstay their welcome. The classic acronym KISS is apt here – Keep It Short & Simple (or Keep It Simple, Stupid if that helps you to remember it!) If copy doesn’t succeed in doing so, the customer will become bogged down in unimportant details, and their journey will be disrupted.
While copy imparts the most information to a website’s user, visual design will have the most immediate impact on them. Both must compliment each other and work in conjunction to best facilitate the visitor’s experience. Most people nowadays have used a few websites in their time, and therefore have an idea of how one is structured and arranged. As a result, most websites will conform to this standard, with the page menu at the top and main content taking up most of the screen.
Both in cases where a website maintains a similar look, and one where it goes against the grain, copy and visual design need to work together to signpost the customer in the right direction. Their journey must always be intuitive, and to facilitate this they must be signposted in all the ways they engage with the website – through colour, shapes and, of course, text.
Copy is not just about bombarding the reader with information, but needs to resonate with them and their journey they’re undertaking with your brand. It’s integral to supporting that journey, and every part of it needs to support that.
If you need Copywriting and Visual Design that helps support a customer’s journey across any medium, get in touch – we’d love to help.