Where does microcopy come from?

Well, when an editor and content management system love each other very much…

No, really, who writes all those little words that play such an important role on a website?

The image on the left is a low resolution picture of a spreadsheet containing the microcopy from a small ecommerce website. There are 260 lines, including:

36 headings and subheadings
32 image alt tags
24 text links
21 button names
20 section, column or tab headings
19 sub navigation items
18 paragraphs
17 link titles
16 tags
14 drop down options
10 form titles
10 form watermarks
4 menu items
3 link icons
2 error messages
1 hover text
1 image link
1 list of meta keywords
1 meta description
1 module title
1 page title appendix
1 strap line
1 tag line

And that’s not all of it. This microcopy was extracted for translation but only part of the site was being translated. Also, where copy was repeated or near repeated – especially true in the metadata – only one message was sent for translation.

In other words, there’s a lot, lot more where that came from.

And that’s just one website. And it’s not even that big.

Who writes the microcopy?

So who writes all this stuff?

Some is automatically generated – in fact this list doesn’t include microcopy autogenerated by the ecommerce software, for example for the purchasing process. That is set in the software, and comes with a translate button (a helpful feature within Shopify).

Some metadata is autogenerated by the CMS, working off the page content. At times this is just perfect – at others it needs to be hand fettled.

But the rest of the microcopy – the bulk of it – is written by human beings. In Fluent, that’s me. Clients are often blissfully unaware that these little words exist, or that there are so many of them. And yet they play such an important role in creating the user experience, tone of voice and converting traffic into business.

Plan it, write it, review it. That’s how these babies are made.