And by “Great”, I don’t mean awesome.
For those of you who don’t know what I mean when I say Lorem Ipsum, it’s standard gibberish copy put in place of the real copy that’s going into your design. It’s been used for decades if not centuries to allow creative teams to test out different visual designs and know what it’ll look like when some words get put in there.
Lorem ipsum dolor sit amet, consectetur adipisicing elit, sed do eiusmod tempor incididunt ut labore et dolore magna aliqua. Ut enim ad minim veniam, quis nostrud exercitation ullamco laboris nisi ut aliquip ex ea commodo consequat. Duis aute irure dolor in reprehenderit in voluptate velit esse cillum dolore eu fugiat nulla pariatur. Excepteur sint occaecat cupidatat non proident, sunt in culpa qui officia deserunt mollit anim id est laborum.
~ a standard paragraph of Lorem Ipsum…
So what’s wrong with this?
I just built a website for a friend over the last half of last week. The designer and I worked together marvelously, which is great because it was our first gig. She was totally into trying out the cool, new tool that launched last week to see if it would help keep us organized while in a hurry (our launch date is today - Monday). The project manager was the one in charge of dealing with the ADD client, so it was really a perfect scenario. We went with Wordpress since everyone was familiar with it.
Friday evening I got a Word doc of the site’s copy. I don’t like placing copy in websites, but whatever. At least it wasn’t in all caps.
This morning I open it up and at least half of the pages are “coming soon”. Approximately half of the remaining pages are four sentences or less. I’m all about white space, but this is a bit too much.
That’s when the title of this post popped into my head.
Simple Rule for Marketing Websites
If you do the design first and the copy last, you lose. If you do the copy first and the design second, you stand a much better chance at succeeding with both.