The Whitfield Group are a genuine, local success story. The only thing they didn’t have in place was a useful presence on the web so they approached us at Endis Solutions asking for a simple site to advertise their services and empty properties.

The challenges from the content side:

• Appealing to different markets, professional and student
• Helping Whitfield to raise their game with photos and copy for the property descriptions
• Finding a unique sales message in a very crowded market
• SEO, in an even more crowded market

To appeal distinctly to their two main types of tenant, we gave them a site each: Whitfield Residential and Whitfield Students. We wrote the student site in a chatty tone, replete with puns. The message is: no agents means fewer fees, plus it’s perfect for Anglia Ruskin University.

Whitfield Students web site

The Residential site does not joke around but we kept the collar loose. The selling point is simplicity. For a long time I had ‘the uncomplicated way to rent’ as the strapline, but had to concede, based in part on cognitive fluency, that simple was simpler than uncomplicated.

We also put an umbrella page up at their old address to build on the search engine ranking. This has worked well: on UK Google searching for ‘Whitfield’ returns over 9 million results. Our man is number one.

Googling ‘Whitfield’ returns over 9 million results. Our man is number one.

As for helping their staff to create compelling property pages, I wrote them a style guide for descriptions as well as a guide to taking photos with their specific (and somewhat lower end) model cameras. Remember the blog post? A bonus was giving a photo of my own – a quick snap during my son’s nursery’s annual float down the River Cam – to our designer, who turned it into an image for the front page. Whitfield have since adopted it for their wider branding.

We are hopefully about to do another raft of work for Whitfield, adding some advanced features to the sites. But in this first stage it was a pleasure to focus on creating something simple, well executed and with a clear message.

Uncomplicated, even.

My River Cam photo, coming soon to some lettings signage near you

Possible on one web site?

To make this happen through a web site is difficult, because there are so many parties involved. Students, scholars and staff are looking for accommodation, but sometimes departments look on their behalf. The University wants to fill its houses and rooms, as do individual Colleges, but only sometimes, and sporadically. Private landlords also want tenants, and hotels and B&Bs would like to advertise in case anyone needs a short-term stopover…

And the staff need to co-ordinate all this behind the scenes.

When we first made a web site for Cambridge University’s Accommodation Service, our hands were tied. There were strict branding and structure guidelines because the site is a subsection of the overall University web site.

When they wanted a redesign – or more accurately a realignment – we found many of those restrictions had loosened. Design was only one part. They wanted to make the information-heavy site clearer and easier to use, as well as adding new features.

The content challenges

• Keeping a depth of information without drowning people in it
• Creating a friendly, helpful but respectable and proper tone (befitting the institution)
• Naming different parties consistently
• Communicating clearly to a multi-cultural audience, some with English as a second language
• Making online registration and other processes as unambiguous as possible to minimise contact with the office
• Selling a service (to several parties) without being sales-like
• Ensuring that user-written content would not dilute the tone and clarity of the site

I tackled much of this through a detailed audit of their content and processes. Once naming and tone decisions had been made, they were ruthlessly applied to content old and new.

We structured the site much more clearly so that each party had a clear route in from the front page – from understanding the purpose of the site, to finding out more, through registration, to eventually having their own logged in homepage, customised to hide any content not directly relevant to them.

Some information was cut, some ordered into ‘Help topics’, and only the most essential and urgent made visible at the top of the hierarchy.

Although there was no sales-sounding pitch, the benefits of the service were shown more clearly to each party, and the staff given the ability to prove their value to the University through analytics and surveys. I wrote style guides to keep new content in line with the new layout and design.

The Accommodation Service project was rewarding because it was a chance to get stuck into real content challenges while having to work closely with the designer and developer.

And it seems to have worked.

Only an hour! What could I possibly do in that time?

The answer so far is: plan a blog post, write a tag line, critique site pages, critique whole web sites, write front page copy, or meet up in the pub to talk about content strategy as a career (that one especially fun).

Here are 3 highlights from some recent free sample requests:

I love working with fresh, innovative companies offering genuinely good things. Pitchup are leading the charge in getting the people of Britain camping again. They provide a massive directory of campsites and the tools to find what you’re after, be it beach, yurt, or proximity to the pub.

They asked me to write them a blog post about celebrity camping. They took the free hour as a discount off the fee. Having captured the company’s tone of voice (their words), I’m now helping with the content for their site realignment – coming soon.

I’ve just sent Mixcloud some suggestions to make their service clearer to first time visitors (only just – no time to implement yet). Sometimes you get too close to a web site and lose the outside view.

Mixcloud loved the objective feedback: ‘this is really helpful. We knew that it could be a lot better but didn’t really know what to do!’ Mixcloud are another original, energetic service. I defy you to start listening to their shows without wanting to get up groove around the office.

Political Insight put a tremendously useful tool into the hands of local and national political groups to help them to communicate and campaign effectively. I gave a free hour to developing the tag line, now in use on the site. They were chuffed. They came back for further copywriting and editing.

Do these examples give you any ideas? Is there anything I could do for you in a free 60 minutes?

Firstly, they have a genuine passion about Saffron Walden because they’re local and have lived there for years, unlike the corporate agents who open hollow branches everywhere.

Secondly, because of this authenticity and experience – and years of hard work – they are repeatedly the number one home-selling agent in the area. And they deserve it.

Their old web site was an uneven jumble of colours, components, microsites; tens of icons with no explanations, miscellaneous pages buried deep in the navigation. It was hard to know where to start, what to click on. Somehow along the way someone had forgotten to put a picture of a house on the front page. What was it that you do again?

Doing the obvious thing well

People are looking for a home, not an estate agent. In terms of the content, this meant stripping away anything inessential to the single task of searching for houses straight away. No questions, no introductions: simply an easy search box next to a big map of the area showing lots of properties. Underneath we put a scrolling gallery of available homes to communicate activity and choice, and most of all to reinforce the message that Kevin Henry provides homes.

Kevin Henry front page

When it’s that easy for the buyer, the seller wants in too.

Company profile, contact details and the articulation of selling points are still vital, so we made them easy to find on the footer and top menu, but the best thing people can discover about an estate agent is that they have loads of homes, easy to find, with lots of details.

Search engine optimisation

And of course people need to find the site in the first place. We set about boosting search rankings with our clandestine, rune-casting, voodoo process of … writing choice content in all the right places: content that makes sense to readers, appeals to search engines, and, don’t forget, appeals to the person reading the search results too. Even the witty strap line got sacrificed (it’s no good having a witty strap if no one ever finds it).

Kevin Henry are now first on Google for ‘saffron walden estate agents’. And it is gratifying that where other results say things like ‘longest established and best known’, ‘we have offices in Saffron Walden’ and ‘a wide range of property’ – that our client’s description says ‘Kevin Henry sell more houses each year in the Saffron Walden area than any other estate agent’.

Which one would you click on?

Personality

The challenge in the rest of the copy was to convey friendliness, even a little bit of cheek, while keeping the tone professional and the experience straightforward. Not everyone can write a business blog but for this client it is the perfect vehicle to display some personality and knowledge. When they started in the late 80s they used to send out humorous newsletters to a mailing list – the blog was simply starting this up again online.

Actually there is a third thing I love about Kevin Henry. As I got to know them, I discovered just how amazing their service is. I heard it from satisfied customers, and I saw the cupboard with bags of Waitrose goodies prepared as a surprise for moving day.

The joy of keeping a web site simple and focused is that customers will already love you for the ease with which they can find relevant information. You don’t need to blow every note on your trumpet from the start. Then, when all the extras of incredible service appear on top, you’ve not just got customers but excited fans.

Endis are a fantastic company with pedigree in web site development. Their unique, versatile platform works for both small and large organisations; commercial and charitable, as an off-the-shelf CMS and for fully customised sites.

When I visited the site to take a screenshot and remind myself of what the project involved, I found that it has been redesigned already. Mostly just tweaking, but it has affected some of the content that was originally there.

I don’t mind one bean if people want to change their sites after they’ve paid me for content work. They own the sites. My work is done.

Except it does give me one small challenge: it affects my portfolio.

In creative industries, especially ones that people haven’t heard much about (content strategy, anyone?), potential customers want to see the difference made for previous clients. But when content is changed by a client – or is dynamic in nature – it can be hard to showcase the work that was originally done.

Even the smallest changes…

Even the smallest changes can have a big impact, especially on the coherence of the content as a whole.

It’s deeper than the choice of one word over another: it’s because taglines and headings and labels are manifestations of an overall content strategy. They are the visible fruit on a tree whose overall growth includes the marketing message, tone of voice, company brand, user experience, SEO and business objectives.

You can’t just stick apples on a pear tree.

The problem with portfolios

And therein lies the problem. Once clients have tweaked a few things, or the user-generated content starts appearing, or they change something about the design, it becomes harder to showcase the strategy behind the content.

Even when nothing changes, sometimes our contribution sits in with other elements that don’t look so hot. There are some other sites that I’ll never add to my portfolio because of the state of the rest of the web site.

I’d love to know what you do to overcome the difficulty. Here are five of my thoughts:

1. Show an unlinked screenshot of when the site was looking good
2. Explain what you did for each client rather than just pointing at the site
3. Include a disclaimer for portfolio entries
4. Offer another way to experience your work – in my case, the free sample
5. Do as much as possible to support good content after release (such as style guides and training)

What else would you do? How do you beat the problem of portfolios? How can you show off your work without other people altering it?

This kind of content could be called supporting copy, creating the supporting frame for the interactions which take place upon the web site. Another term I like (and just coined I think) is environmental copy: the content which sets the environment for users to interact.

Setting the right environment for a web site where existing customers come for support demands a clear user experience and easy access to the help that they need.

Share Insight front page

On Share Insight this included items on the menu needing to be clearer and more compelling. ‘Getting started’ should have been ‘Get started’ to suggest action; ‘Documentation’ and ‘Release notes’ are developer terms – wouldn’t users prefer ‘Solutions’ and ‘New releases’? ‘FAQs’ had to go, if only because a lot of people don’t know what it stands for. ‘Help Topics’ might be longer but at least people know what it means.

I also pushed for a clearer information architecture (the Insight platform is well designed to chop and change content groups around, so it wasn’t too late to change the order).

Although scant to begin with, a lot of the environmental copy was redundant. It’s tempting to explain ‘on this page you can…’ but the golden rule is  always let the features speak for themselves. Show, don’t tell. If people can’t tell immediately that they’re looking at a forum and know how to read and post on it straight away … then it’s time to lay out the forum differently and rename the buttons. Otherwise the site will be crowded with noisy explanations and it will become too much like hard work to do anything on it.

Strap line and search box

Finally there were one or two legitimate paragraphs that needed tweaking, such as the front page tag line and strap. A sweet twist was to get the strap line to explain the site at the same time as inviting users to explore the site through the search box. It’s vital that users know what a web site is for and what to do next within seconds of first finding it.

Resort page on sevenholidays.com

The book is a page turner. Enjoyable to read, as you marvel at the luxurious top resorts, and get sucked in to deciding which resort you would like the most. Putting all this information online (free) from a content perspective was about finding a neat way to present the reviews and photography, but more importantly, of sucking people in in the first place.

When I first visited Copyblogger I experienced this sucking in effect. I would be halfway through an article telling myself ‘this is the last one’ when a headline would catch my eye in the right hand column and I’d go for just one more.

Headlines in the right column

This is microcontent at its best. So for sevenholidays.com I put in a catchy headline for each resort, from the front page in, and appearing at the top and bottom of every review page.

Every resort also needed a summary, and each review needed editing for the web. In addition there was new content to ghostwrite and edit: a Maldives Guide and glossary, aimed to be useful to those holidaying there, rather than give boring facts about the country.

Did you know, for example, that you can always drink the resort water (regardless of what the signs say), to head for westerly islands in our winter months if you want to see whale sharks, and that one of the single most important factors if taking kids is to find an island with mature palms to provide shade?

Content work for sevenholidays.com involved writing, editing, micro-content, branding, positioning, SEO, and information architecture, as part of the Endis Solutions team designing and building the whole site. It was great to have a piece of content (the book) to begin with, but the challenges were in translating it into compelling, useful web  material, and then to research and produce other content to create a dynamic context in which to house it.

I think it has worked well. And I’ve got my eye on Mirihi. What about you?

I came into their new UK sales web site project as a copywriter, but ended up having a big say in the overall structure and tone of the site. Insight does so much that the important thing was to draw out a few selling points clearly and simply instead of trying to get them all in and losing people in the ensuing melee.

We decided to build the pitch around the system’s many applications. The first thing was to brand them ‘features’ (what’s an application to their customers, anyway?). The second thing was to decide which features to include. Having lots of features is itself a feature, but I recommended keeping it nevertheless to a round 20 (there are many more).

ChurchInsight sales site front page

So not all of Insight’s applications made it; nor are all those that did actually applications (another reason to call them features). But the 20 featured are significant functions that ChurchInsight’s potential customers want. And that’s the important thing.

Each feature needed a name, a tagline/tooltip, a summary and additional copy. The multitude of selling points needed condensing into three concepts for the front page. In addition I wrote comprehensive FAQs, landing pages for the tour and free trial offer, and descriptions of pricing and additional services.

To generate some fresh customer testimonials and case studies I devised a questionnaire for existing Insight customers. I learnt that asking for criticism as well as praise is a huge incentive to reply, and that it’s good to honest about your angle on the research (‘your feedback helps us develop our product and we want to quote you on our new web site’).

Testimonial worth sharing

One spin off from the research was the discovery of two dominant themes in the feedback. ‘Easy to use’ and ‘helpful support’ came up again and again. I worked that back into the copy. It is satisfying to build existing customers’ favourite things about the platform into the sales message for new people. And it helped with the tone: on the whole hard-selling web sites to religious third sector groups does not work as much as showing the benefits confidently and honestly.

Apart from writing all the pages, the main work for ChurchInsight was in deciding what – in the whole sea of features and selling points – to represent simply as the main message. It was pleasing to have existing customers help me out.

The main challenge in furnishing the site with copy was writing for all the different audiences on the same site. The public are after a simple, useful and clear service. Tradespeople need to be sold memberships. Members need to enjoy the benefits that their membership has brought them, and the staff need to make sense of it all behind the scenes.

All on one web site.

Clear interface as a starting point for multiple users

It was not just about choosing the right voices, tone and vocabulary. Another consideration was that the site needed to remain a consistent whole: clearly addressing each audience on their own terms without breaking into discrete sections.

The further consideration was to maintain a transparency across the web site. The public could see the sales pitch to the tradespeople. Members could see how the public were engaged. So each piece of copy had to appeal to the motivations of its primary audience, while affirming the motivations of the any other parties who might be browsing off piste.

Each section needed to play its part in affirming the mutual benefits of the service.

Part of the work was in naming the concepts, processes, functions and elements of an innovative model so that everyone could understand them. The staff would call a process something logical to them, but which is confusing or obtuse to those using their service. As a content strategist you become the mediator – first grasping what the concept really is or does, before translating it for the customer. Then you need to convince the staff that the change is necessary, and teach them to either accept the new term, or more likely (and helpfully), to live with both.

Members Area screencast

Since the initial work I have been part of the team managing and developing checkatrade.com. This has included everything from scripting screencasts to writing blog posts. It is always a pleasure to work on something that you believe is actually providing a great service.

If you need a trustworthy plumber, you know where to look.

So editing Cantle’s first web site was about making sure that the descriptions enticed without giving too much away. The copy worked with sumptuous photography to wet potential client’s appetites. Not giving too much away meant keeping the blocks of prose short and allowing plenty of white space to let the content breathe on the page – essential for the tone of the organisation whose tagline is ‘breathing life back into organisations’.

Photography, text and white space on cantle.net

With no need for a forceful sales message, shaping Cantle’s content was more about deciding how much material to include, getting the experiential and seductive tone consistent, and tightening up the language where perhaps psycho-babble had slipped in. All is forgiven in front of a roaring fire with a single malt in hand up at the centre, but on the public web site the language needed to be as sharp as the coaching.

Fade-in strap line on Cantle site

A final word on Cantle – the leadership and coaching training is second to none. Without exaggeration a few days spent with Jim McNeish can revolutionise your organisation or career. He’s the guy that all the other trainers are desperately trying to be.

My limited experience of web professionals so far is that we’re quick to dismiss stuff like coaching and development. Our loss. We’ll grow up one day and I hope when we do that Cantle will have some places left.