In a three-hour crunch session, the three of us sat down, stood up, paced, and sweated out the majority of the content for our website. The first question might be, “Why three hours?” Granted, yes, many of us can write an English paper in three hours, as opposed to the few paragraphs we generated. However, the language used here has to be directed and written very carefully…

For our About page, we struggled to word our identity in such a way that it conveyed who we are as a company in the shortest amount of words possible. Our first draft:

We are a creative team that thrives on working for and with passionate people. Our goal is to establish meaningful relationships with our clients and provide them with exceptional products. We strive to create personal relationships in a digital world. For a robust listing of what we can accomplish, please visit our services section.

So, what’s wrong with this? Well, for one, it’s a bit verbose. Another thing is that it fails to address the reader in a familiar, comfortable way. Also, we wanted to avoid using directive language, such as “please visit our services section.”

Revising this paragraph called into discussion of who we are and what our goals are. Much of what we talked about revolved around things we had already covered in our voluminous business plan. It was then that it dawned on us that this paragraph was essentially a down-to-earth, abbreviated version of it. What we finally came up with was the following:

Tridea Design is a group of passionate minds that provide creative solutions. Your company is unique; we strive to form meaningful relationships with you to mix what makes your business special with our creativity.

It’s tight, descriptive, and speaks straight and on-the-level with the reader. We are a company dedicated to strong connections with our clients. As we reviewed other design company sites for inspiration, we came across, time and time again, highly technical and jargon-laden language that would go over the head of business owners. We know you don’t use terms like , , or . By keeping our vocabulary relatable and understandable, we hope those who read it will gain an understanding of what we do, without the distraction of such jargon.

Writing content for a website has many considerations, foremost of who your target audience is. In addition, with websites, you only have so much time to reach your user before they navigate away. This means that the content must say as much as possible with just a few words. We encounter these considerations everytime we sit down with websites, whether it’s this site, the sites we work on, or our own.

Take some time to think about how you write, how it fits the audience it’s written for, and the form of media it’s conveyed in.