On working with copywriters

The single highest-leverage thing a small studio can do, on a website project, is bring a copywriter onto the project at the same time as the designer.

Not before. Not after. At the same time.

Most studios still run the project sequentially. The designer makes the page. The page goes to the client. The client fills the page in. The result is a layout that was sized for placeholder text, and a piece of writing that is trying to fit into a layout that was not designed for it. Both ends suffer.

The studios that do this differently produce noticeably better work. The mechanism is not subtle. The copywriter, sitting in the same kick-off meeting as the designer, will hear the brief in the same room. They will catch the moments where the brief is unclear. They will write to the audience, not to the layout. The designer, in turn, will design to the actual length of the headline, not to a guess about what the headline might be. The handoff goes away because there is no handoff.

The drawback is that this is more expensive in the short term. The studio is paying two people to be in the same meeting. Most studios cannot afford this for every project. The right move, if you cannot run two roles in parallel, is to pick the projects where the copy is doing the heavy lift (most landing pages, most homepages, most editorial work) and run those projects with both. The other projects can run sequentially.

A few copywriters I have worked with and recommend: Andy Welfle, Nicole Fenton, and Erika Hall. All of them do small-business work. All of them are worth the cost.

If you cannot afford a copywriter, the next best thing is to write the copy yourself, before designing anything. Not after. Before. The page should be designed for the copy, not the other way round, and you cannot design for copy that does not yet exist.

Most of the bad small-business websites I see were designed first and written second. Reverse the order and the work gets noticeably better, almost immediately, even with the same designer.