The single most important factor which will dictate the success or otherwise of your website is what your website says.  Words offer the most powerful online currency there is.  A dictum emerged within the internet industry which confirms that whereas offline commerce is selling with personality, online commerce is selling with content.

It might seem obvious that words are a crucially important element of your website.  After all, website navigation, structure and meta data are all made up of words.  Your content will be a combination of words and functionality, search engines index your site based on words and people search your site based on words.  I am sometimes taken aback therefore at how little consideration companies give to the words on their website.

Web projects typically comprise many disparate but related disciplines.  There are areas of site design, look and feel, content management, hosting options, complementary email campaigns, and so on.  Nearly always the area which has been thought of least is what the site is actually going to say.

I am not saying that good design doesn’t matter.  It’s crucially important.  I make my living partially from it.  Neither am I saying that content management should be ignored or that it doesn’t matter who you host your website or intranet with.  However I am saying that these elements have been given a distorted priority in the minds of many web managers and indeed internet agencies.

Perhaps this is related to the great automation promise, that on the web everything can be automated.  Everything has to happen in real time.  There is a technical solution to every situation.  There is no doubt the web has changed the pace and efficiency of our lives incalculably, however some things cannot and should not be done automatically.  Writing good copy and helping your online reader to carry out their tasks are just two of those things.

Fundamentally, research confirms that writing for the web is not the same as writing for print.  People read differently online, often scan reading and jumping from one piece of content to the next.  People are online to get something done, and are turned on by calls to action and links or features which help them get their task completed.

Gladly, because the web is a large worldwide library of information, we have quick and easy access to examples of best practice (as well as worst practice of course).  The best examples unsurprisingly  come from companies who have a ruthless commercial imperative to make their websites as profitable as possible.  These organisations cannot afford indulgences like introspective marketing campaigns.  Rather they must use their content to sell.

Companies like Dell, Amazon, BBC, Google, Irish Times and others understand the importance of words.  If you look at their sites you will see functionally full, content rich resources.  Navigation is intuitive.  They grab your attention.  They encourage you to find out more or to carry out your task.  They are building brand not with flash graphics or clever technology.  They are building brand with well laid out, cleverly constructed content which their readers want.

Poor online content, or offline content merely transposed to the web, will damage your reputation.  It may mean that your technically robust, pretty looking, solidly hosted website is only paper thin.  Words are the single biggest difference between a good website and a bad one.  Invest time in producing the right words to empower your online readers to carry out their tasks and find the information they want.  It will maximise the opportunity to turn them into online customers.