I remember building my first corporate intranet site: a giant glossary of company jargon in an Adobe Acrobat file. It was 1998, and we couldn't figure out what else employees would use an intranet site for. They were already getting all the important news in print.
Fast forward 12 years, and finding things to put on corporate web sites is no longer the problem. More often, sites are overstuffed with everything you need—and don't need—to know about a company.
For corporate communicators today, the challenge isn't building new web sites, but rather cleaning out and remodeling old ones. Sometimes that's more overwhelming than just starting from scratch.
If you're about to renovate your corporate web site, here are some pointers from a writer who has been there many times.
In the past three years, I've helped rewrite several web sites for several well-established organizations. One irritated me. Another made me cry. And another made me say, "Why can't they all be this easy?"
Make your web site renovation one of the easy ones. Here's how.
Redesign the floor plan first
Rewriting an entire web site may be intimidating, but here's some good news: You don't start by writing; you start by organizing.
Web professionals call it "developing site architecture." Writing professionals call it "outlining." Think of it as the floor plan for your site or a site diagram.
Home, About Us, Products, Markets, Shopping Cart, or whatever you call the sections of your site, should each have their own square in the diagram. So should everything you plan to put in these sections. The more levels of squares, the better. Each square equals one page.
Once you know how many pages are in each section and what one message each page should communicate, you can start cranking out copy, fast. It's much easier to write one page at a time than one section at a time. And the text links between pages fall into place.
One company thought they had found a shortcut to this process. They planned to write the information first, and then segment it into web pages. They brought in a team of writers, assigned them sections of the site and gave them lists of topics to include, but offered no page-by-page outline.
Today, almost a year later, the company has a mass of information that reads like an encyclopedia, but still no new web site.
Another organization brought in a web writer nearly a year after beginning their web site renovation. They had already determined site organization, page by page, and presented the outline to the writer. Sure, there's been some rearranging of content and some pages have been added or deleted, but nothing that has stalled the project.
Six months later, all the pages are written and the site is almost ready to unveil.
Choose your colors…of voice
Whether you have one writer or a whole team, make sure everyone knows how to write in the company voice. First person or third person? Formal or conversational? AP or Chicago style?
One company skipped this step. They outlined their site and assigned sections to various writers. What they got back were chunks of the site all written in a different way. Some had long paragraphs that required lots of scrolling. Others had short, choppy bits with lots of bulleted lists.
None of the styles were wrong, but all of them together made the company look like it had multiple personalities.
To avoid that, one company created a mood board. Typically, mood boards are for visual designers, communicating a visual tone through colors, imagery and fonts. But they work for wordsmiths, too, to help communicate a tone through syntax and writing style.
Another company created content templates. That way, all writers assigned to write pages about products, for example, included these elements:
- An introductory paragraph of fewer than 80 words, with the product name and key benefits.
- A photo showing the product.
- A bulleted list of features.
- A bulleted list of applications.
- Links in the right-hand column to brochures and catalogs.
Don't build an addition if you have nothing to put in it
In other words, don't plan web pages about topics your company isn't ready to discuss.
One company really wanted a "Corporate Citizenship" section on its web site. Their peer companies all had one. They had pieces of one—a health and safety report, community relations, corporate sponsorships—but no strategy tying it all together. The manager was new, and the name of the discipline hadn't even been decided. Should they call it Corporate Citizenship, Global Citizenship, Sustainability, Social Responsibility? They opted to muscle through some web pages anyway. They called in a writer to start drafting and to come up with strategic messaging as she went along.
After countless rewrites, no one was completely comfortable with the final web pages, and they were removed a year later.
Another company, in the same situation, also had pieces of a “Corporate Citizenship” page, but no strategy. They opted to postpone the section until they had something solid to write about.
Give people a tour—don't show them the plans
Web writers may do all their work in a word processing document with notes about page hierarchy and text links. But that's not what reviewers or whoever is responsible for web page content should approve.
Web sites aren't linear, and approvers can't envision pages and links in an 80-page document. Show them the real thing—or something close to it, maybe on a test site.
After months of chasing sources and begging for approvals on enormous text documents, one company went ahead and built web pages with preliminary, unapproved content. That grabbed some attention. With content presented in a more manageable format, sources quickly responded with edits.
Keep renovating
The good thing (or bad thing?) about web sites is that they're always a work in progress. So there's always time to learn an easier way to write and rewrite them.
These tips may get you started. Or wait a couple years and try again. Today's renovation won't be the last.
