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My experience is that website production is regularly delayed because website content is not developed timely.  At times clients shave off copywriting fees as a way to decrease their overall website budget, intending to develop copy themselves.  Some are successful and do a great job! However, some of these very busy people who are running businesses don’t have the time it takes to write their content — website production stops and can be delayed for months.  Writing effective website copy is an intricate process. 

1. You have to write to a target audience
2. Employ marketing and search engine strategies
3. Excite the user about products and services
4. Devote time in this hugely time consuming endeavor

I am a business owner and know full-on the old true adage — Time is money.  Business owners and managers would be money ahead to hire a professional copywriter for their project, get their website launched and start receiving a return on their website investment.  They would have time to further their business and not take that time to try and develop website content.  As an owner of an advertising agency, I have similar situations where I have to hire professionals to do certain projects so they can perform high-quality work while I manage my business.  With that said, here are some guidelines for clients who plan to write website copy.  This is A Letter to My Client as follows:

Dear Client:
Here are some guidelines and hints for writing copy for your website.  Please look at the staged development site or print out:
•    Website comps (Home, Index and Sub pages)
•    Site Map
•    Meta Data (Title Tags with keywords)

View the overall concept keeping in mind that the Site Map is the website guide — every page is
described on it so you can see the very architecture of the website we are building out for you.  Our goal for any website visitor is to have a good experience — we like to follow Steve Krug's sensible copywriting approach of Don’t Make Me Think.  This goes hand in hand with Usability Best Practices and effective Search Engine Optimization.
Easy Navigation includes:

Compelling and informative copy
Meta data

The numbers of pages on the site that you need to develop copy for are:

Write copy for one page at a time; look at the development site or the printed comp design layout
and match your content to the layout for each page. Keep in mind; if this is too overwhelming, we have professional copywriters available.  Let’s keep our
target launch date so the site can start giving you a return on your investment!

Viktorya is a Search Engine Specialist and co-owner of Go Traffic Interactive, a Northern California, San Francisco Bay Area advertising agency.  Viktorya lives in Sacramento Ca.