Simon Griffiths Blog

I came across this as a discussion point from the boagworld podcast, and thought that it was somethning I could comment on. The reason I think I might be able to add to this debate is that unlike most of the people speaking on it, I work in a marketing department that happens to be geeky enough to design, code and write our own sites. We are therefore creating the complete site including copy.

Okay have said that, as usual there seems to cases for and against arguing that the copy is part of the design. As I see it these are as follows: -

Cases for copy being part of web design

• The style of the copy should match that of the design. It is no use having a very corporate looking site, and then using informal language in your copy. Equally an eclectic looking site should not be written in a formal style.
• This is the most important one for me…SEO. Your content needs to be written in such a way that it is both attractive and easy to scan and read, as well as being search engine friendly. Meta descriptions, headings  etc also need to match the content. This is not an easy job, and is certainly not something that you can just re-use content from your brochure, or sales letters and plonk it in. It is also something that in my experience, requires a bit of experience, and enough time to research how to make the most of your heading, what you can and cannot do etc.
• The copy should also be brief and pointed. Something us marketers sometimes have trouble doing. It should also be largely ‘sales talk’ free. One way to quickly lose a web user is to pitch to them!
• Keyword research allows the correct search terms to be targeted rather than terms that are used by the company.

Cases against copy being part of web design

• A big problem is often that the web design company will have no experience in the particular product or service on the website. The only way to get them up to speed on it would be some level of product training, or providing notes or other promotional material that they can base their copy on. However in our experience copywriters only rarely do a good job, and writing in a web style may mean that it looks worse than it actually is. In general us marketing types like to word things certain ways to match our customers requirements, and there is often good reason for that.
• Use of material. This is also a big one. To be honest I hope this objection is dying out, but many old school marketers don’t want their information re-used or re-purposed in ways that they are not totally aware of.
• Terminology. This can be an issue if particular language is often used at a company. I run across this frequently at the company I work for. My favourite terms I have managed to cut out in the last few years are ‘double return flat face gutter’ and ‘full length butt hinge’. I’m sure these are important to our designers, but to most of our customer, this means nothing. However in many cases certain terminology might conflict with key word research.

Conclusion

So what would be my conclusion from this? In my opinion the advantages of having copy as part of the web design process far outweigh the disadvantages. A good copy writer should be able to take content given to them and repurpose it so that it hits the correct keywords, is more scannable, and still meets the marketing requirements (if those are made clear to them).

The third point I made up in the againsts, is really a for if you turn it around. Company specific terminology should not be used on a website, more generic terms make things easier to understand and opens up the site to a far wider audience of clients which may not have dealt with you before.

Do I think this will happen quickly? Probably not! Traditional marketing may not quite get the web yet, but try selling your services to companies that do, or alternatively companies that don’t have a large enough marketing team to do it themselves. Once you have a few under your belt, you will probably find that you can get others by reference.

You may be familiar with the use of personas for design. These are the summary of a typical users characteristics in a short page or so, often giving details of their working day, gender, age, what is important to them in their job, who they report to, what they like to do outside of work etc.I have recently had personas developed for the majority of our typical users. To do this we interviewed sales people about what they thought of a person and pretty much took it from there. I am now about to present these to the sales team and try to get their buy in on the project. Basically I would like them to look at personas when requesting literature, and try to give us in marketing an idea of who we should be writing for.My problem will be that the persona will be based around a particular person, or combination of people that the particular salesperson had in his mind eye at the time, and I am sure that will be controversial.At the moment I am wrestling with the problem of should I allow changes? The trouble with changing a persona is that it will tend to dilute it and make it what we think it should be as a group, rather than a particular case which we know to be the case. I will let you know how I go. The presentation is on Friday, so I’ll have to have my arguments together by then! 

I am just about to implement the new Google Analytics tracking code. One of the features of this is said to be cross domain tracking. This would be useful for us as I run more than 1 website with links between them, but are Google doing a doubleclick on this?

When I say that what I mean is that Doubleclick is notorious for putting a cookie on your system, then tracking you across the many sites they serve ads to. This invades the users privacy but allows them to build up a profile of who you are and what you like.

As Google has just acquired Doubleclick, are they trying the same trick? Wouldn’t allowing it’s users to track across domains, also allow Google to do the same across the many sites where analytics is installed.

I have to say I am a big fan of Analytics and am contantly amazed by the complexity and new features that are brought online, and for free. I am going to continue with the upgrade, but I am a bit worried about it!

I am just trying to get a mini intranet site together for my partner. She is a visual merchandiser and wants to share images, calendars etc with colleagues in different states.  At the moment I can’t decide between Google Apps and a Ning Social network.

On the one hand the Google Apps ensure that I can brand the site for free, give great calendar, email integration, but there isn’t much in the way of photo sharing. On the other hand Ning gives a great social experience with images, but no calendar. Has anyone come across a good solution for this?

I guess I could set up subdomains for each one but there is so much repeat stuff in there.

Hope you all have a great Easter. I am going to try to keep my hands off the eggs a bit tomorrow (I am writing this on Saturday night).To give you an update on tad.tw, handing out the cards in the city to commuters really didn’t have a significant effect on my stats. The mobile stuff is so tricky, as you can’t promote it as a traditional site, and there are very few avenues open. The next attack will be via traditional methods too. I am going to look at putting some press release in magazines and the paper, to see what that brings. I have also bought another domain brisbanetraintimes.com, which being international should help the organic page rankings, even though wouldn’t be that great for the user.btw – If you do have a look at tad and see the news and weather. I am also working on a way to get these more up to date. For some reason, even though I am using the same method the news comes through okay, but weather and TV are coming through sporadically or not at all.

The cards for tad.tw got handed out yesterday. I am waiting with bated breath to see if anything happened to my stats.

I am also going to write press releases etc over this weekend and see if I can shoot them off to a few places so that hopefully it will get picked up.

Mobile marketing is pretty tricky. I am not sure how to approach the SEO or the traditional marketing side really. Standard websites are much easier!

Yahoo have just announced it will use semantic markup to check relevance of pages. I think this is a good move by Yahoo, but I’m not sure how it will allow competition with Google. Trouble is that it will require so much more markup, and we aren’t really sure what tags it will support yet.

Great news for microformats though.

I have just finished an update to my other site. tad.tw is a mobile phone site that gives all the Brisbane train times on a mobile phone, that can be operated by one hand as you are walking along. I have just added ABC TV times so that you can check the TV too as your commuting. Check out the news too. I actually like the single line versions! 

If you haven’t seen overlay.tv yet, take a look. You can overlay video off YouTube with info and embed it in your blog.

This is a great tool for all you marketers out there (like me). If you are looking at fashion brands you could video you shows then add tags so that people can just click on them and buy them online.

I’ll try to get one up in the next few days so you can see what I mean.

I have just had a look at IE8 and how to implement activities. I was hoping for microformats or data detectors within IE8, but what do we get instead? Proprietary code that just looks like the start of the browser wars 2.0.

What are you think MS? On the one hand you finally develop a browser that looks like it is standard compliant, then you go and add in your own custom tags!!! When will you learn!!????