There is a moment in almost every website project where somebody says "we just need the copy now." The design is signed off, the boxes are drawn, the lorem ipsum is still in them. Somebody on the client side is handed a spreadsheet of section names and asked to fill it in by Friday. What comes back is competent, generic and about forty per cent too long, and it goes live because the launch date is fixed.
That is not a writing problem. It is a sequencing problem. Copy written to fit a layout will always sound like a layout. Copy written from a strategy sounds like a company. The highlighter in the picture is the whole method: one line, drawn deliberately, across a lot of paper. Most of the work is deciding what not to highlight.
Copy is where the strategy becomes audible
A brand strategy gives you positioning, an audience, a personality and a set of messages. Almost none of that is visible on the page. The logo does not say who you are for. The colour palette does not explain why you rather than the alternatives. The only place a visitor actually meets the strategy is in the words, which is why copy is the least optional part of a website and the part most often treated as filler.
So before any writing, put four things on one page and keep it open the whole time:
Positioning. The one working sentence: what you do, for whom, why you. Every headline on the site is a version of it.
Audience. The one person you are writing to, the problem they arrived with, the objection they are silently holding.
Tone of voice. The three to five traits with their edges: direct, not blunt. Warm, not cute. Confident, not loud.
Messaging. The core message, the two or three pillars that support it, and the proof for each.
If you do not have these, the copy will invent them by accident, and you will end up with a brand defined by whoever wrote the About page at eleven at night. If you want the longer version of what those documents contain, we wrote it up in what brand strategy consists of.
Write the argument before the pages
A website is not a collection of pages. It is one argument, spread across them, that a visitor should be able to follow from the first headline to the contact form without ever wondering why a section is there. So write the argument first, as a plain list, before you open the design file:
Argument first, pages second
What we do. Who it is for. Why us and not the others. The proof. What happens next. That order, or a close cousin of it, is the homepage. Every other page is one of those steps expanded. Services expands "what we do". Work and testimonials expand "the proof". About expands "why us", which is why an About page that only lists the founding year and the office dog is a wasted page.
When the argument exists as a list, the copy has a job in every section, and the designer has real hierarchy to work with instead of guessing which box should be biggest.
Tone of voice is a set of edits, not a mood
Tone documents fail because they describe a feeling and then leave the writer to guess. "Confident" means nothing at the keyboard. What works is translating each trait into a rule you can apply to a sentence you have already written.
Direct, not blunt becomes: lead with the verb, cut the warm-up clause, keep the courtesy. "We think you might find that our approach can help" becomes "We help companies look established from day one."
Warm, not cute becomes: write like a person, ban the jokes in the navigation, never name a button "Let's gooo".
Confident, not loud becomes: state it once, prove it, do not add an exclamation mark or the word "truly" to make it stronger.
Do this for each trait and you have a style guide that fits on a page and actually gets used. The test for any sentence on the site is whether it could be swapped into a competitor's website without anyone noticing. If it could, it is not in your voice yet. It is in the industry's voice, which belongs to nobody.
Section by section
The hero
One line that is the positioning in the customer's words, and one line underneath that says who it is for or what happens next. That is all. The hero is not the place for the mission statement, the tagline, the awards and the three feature bullets. If a visitor reads only this and leaves, they should be able to describe what you do to a friend.
The what-we-do section
Name the services plainly. "Brand identity" beats "Brand experiences". "Web design" beats "Digital transformation". Clever names for ordinary services cost you every visitor who was searching for the ordinary name, and make the ones who stay work to decode you.
The proof
Specific beats superlative every time. "Rebranded a 40-person law firm in nine weeks" does more than "award-winning". Numbers, names, before-and-afters, a quote that sounds like a real person said it. If you are new and have no proof yet, say what you believe and how you work instead of inventing a testimonial. Readers can smell the invented ones.
The About page
This is the page where the tone gets to breathe, and the one most companies leave as a timeline. Write it as the answer to "why should I trust you with this", in the first person plural, with a point of view. What you think is wrong with how your industry usually does things is far more interesting than the year you were founded.
Calls to action
Say what happens when the button is pressed. "Start a project" or "Book a call" over "Get started" or "Learn more". One primary action per page, repeated, rather than five competing ones. The button label is copy too, and it is the piece of copy most often left to the developer.
The edit that makes it sound like one company
First drafts of website copy are always written by committee, even when one person types them, because every section pulls in the language of whoever cares about it most. The sales team's page sounds like sales. The founder's page sounds like the founder. The edit is where it becomes a brand.
Read the whole site aloud, top to bottom, in one sitting. Cut every sentence that repeats one you have already read. Cut every adjective that is doing the job a fact should do. Check that the headline of every section is a claim, not a label: "We design brands that last" rather than "Our services". Then check each page against the tone rules, one trait at a time, and against the argument: does this section move the visitor one step forward, or is it here because there was a box?
Aim to lose a third. The copy that remains will be the line the highlighter drew: shorter than you expected, and impossible to mistake for anyone else's.
Frequently asked
Should website copy be written before or after design?
Before, or at least alongside. Design that is laid out around placeholder text gets rewritten to fit boxes; copy that leads gives the designer real hierarchy to work with.
What is tone of voice in website copy?
The consistent character in how a brand writes: its rhythm, vocabulary and attitude. It is set in the brand strategy as three to five traits with a this-not-that edge, then applied to every page.
How long should a homepage be?
As long as it takes to make one argument in order: what you do, who it is for, why you, the proof, and what to do next. For most businesses that is five to seven sections and under 400 words.
