B1BLOG

If many in our industry are to be believed, copy is some­what of a optional extra when it comes to mar­coms. Or maybe a neces­sary evil. To be tol­er­ated as long as it doesn’t exceed 30 words or so. Of course you see this most in advert­ising which has become increas­ingly image-led over the years. Dir­ect mail still res­ists, bolstered by the moun­tains of evid­ence that copy drives response. And then there’s web.

Look at the usab­il­ity stud­ies and you’ll see that effect­ive web copy is a case of less is more. Unfor­tu­nately many design­ers seem to take this as an excuse to design lay­outs allow­ing not 30 words, but 30 char­ac­ters of copy – even on highly com­plex products. Rather than help­ing to struc­ture the mes­sage, all too often copy is seen as the stuff that simply replaces the lorem ipsum in the design.

This is nuts.

It’s copy, more often than not, that vis­it­ors to a site are look­ing for. It’s copy that sells products, ser­vices and ideas. Copy is a core part of the exper­i­ence. This is espe­cially so in B2B where com­plex argu­ments must be com­mu­nic­ated effi­ciently, power­fully and elegantly.

This is not a call to have end­less scrolling copy on every page you serve. Good copy can achieve its aims in sur­pris­ingly few words.

So just as an exper­i­ment, on the next site you cre­ate – start with the copy.

Giz­modo points to a video of an EeePC 900 tricked out to fea­ture a pretty nifty touch screen inter­face. Nice. I can’t wait to see what the emer­ging net­book mar­ket turns up by the end of the year, there’s so much going on there right now.