by Fiona Humberstone on February 5, 2010
When your potential clients look at your website what do they see? An engaging and inspiring paragraph about how you can solve their problem? Or reams and reams of text about your business, how long you’ve been trading and why they should use you.
Writing powerful copy is always underestimated. Why? Because we all feel that because we can write, we can write copy that sells. That’s simply not the case. All too often company websites are littered with “we”, “us” “our” more than they feature “you” “your” “you’re”. I’m on a mission to change that and bring you in more business!
Join me for a Copywriting Workshop on Thursday 11th Feb at the Talbot Inn, Ripley and I’ll show you how to write more powerfully for your business.
by Fiona Humberstone on January 31, 2010
Yesterday morning I hit the “go” button on the website. I took down the holding page, took a deep breath and launched the Flourish website.
After more than six months developing the brand: from selecting a name (that’s another story for another day) to developing the logo, choosing colours and rolling out the corporate identity, the website seems like the final step in making it all feel real. I’ve bought the champagne, ordered the cake and am looking forward to my first official day in business as Flourish!
I’m not certain we won’t tweak the design of this site. I for one think that the illustrations might be a little ‘plain’ compared to the homepage. And particularly for our ‘engaging’ brand, I’d like them to have a little more texture, a little more going on. But the challenge is that it’s hard to use stock images without them using cheesy. And you also need to have a theme. Now the obvious theme for flourish is gardening – and I love the images I’ve used on the homepage. But there’s a fine balance between metaphorical gardening images, and the whole thing looking like a seed catalogue! It’s a difficult balance…
So for now, partly because I’m exhausted, and partly because I want to see what the team think, I’m going to leave the website as is. We’re passionate about never missing deadlines, so I was delighted that I launched 24 hours early. And yes, if you look closely you’ll see that one page is waiting for content (the portfolio plugin I’d planned to use just didn’t work so it looks like we’ll need to code it by hand) but overall I like it. We do need to get the portfolio coded (and fast) but because our blog is so rich in case studies I felt it was ok to launch without it.
I’d love to know what you think about the illustrations. Are they too plain? Or do you think everything else (background and blog) are so full on that it’s nice to keep things simple? The jury’s still out for me, but I’m glad to have it launched. I’m off to slouch on the sofa with a cup of tea and a magazine.
