What does a first-time visitor see at your site? I'll tell you. (Santa Barbara)
offered in person
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Is your message getting across to people who don’t already know your company and your technology?
I'm in Santa Barbara. Give me a call (408-370-6521) and I’ll visit your website as an attentive outsider and give you a clear, candid report:
• Can I quickly tell what you offer?
• Is the important information easy to find?
• Are unfamiliar terms explained?
• Do photographs and diagrams have useful captions?
• Does the writing communicate—or merely sound impressive?
• What might confuse a prospective customer, investor, employee, or partner?
• What could be rewritten, rearranged, explained, or added?
THE PROBLEM WITH INSIDER WEBSITES
At two recent tech startup meetups, several people told me how often they encounter websites they cannot understand.
The companies behind those sites know exactly what they do. That may be the problem.
They write as though every visitor is already focused on the same thing they are. One speaker, for example, talked about “11,000 PRs being shipped.” To most people, PR means public relations. In the software world, it can mean pull requests.
The same thing happens when a company displays a photograph of an unfamiliar device without a caption. The people inside the company recognize it immediately. The visitor sees a whatchamacallit.
Many sites rely on phrases that could describe almost any business. Remove three or four keywords, and the remaining text says practically nothing.
The company is paying attention to itself instead of sharing attention with its visitors.
WHAT I DO
I’m an experienced copywriter and creative director who specializes in making technical subjects understandable to people outside the technical circle.
I look at websites as advertising—not advertising in the loud, promotional sense, but in the original sense: making something widely known.
I can evaluate your existing site, identify obstacles to understanding, and recommend practical improvements. If you want help making those improvements, I can also rewrite or edit the copy.
Your visitors probably don’t have attention deficit disorder. They may simply need you to tell them, plainly and specifically, what you want them to know.
If you’d like to find out what your website says to a first-time human visitor, send me the URL.
Here's a list of companies I've helped: www.colin.org/home/technical-copywriting/