As many of you know, late last year I rewrote the sales page for Aaron Wall’s SEO Book (if you don’t own it yet, you should, and that’s my affiliate link). Aaron has come to some conclusions about the new copy, which he shares here.
Also, check out another project that I worked on for e-learning software company Articulate. In conjunction with a complete redesign of the site, I rewrote all the site copy, and moved to a headline-focused format (imagine that) for the home page, mission statement, and each product, such as the recently released Engage and Articulate Online.
Articulate is an awesome company headed up by CEO Adam Schwartz, one of the coolest clients I’ve ever worked with, in any field. If all clients were like Adam, I’d probably take on more of them. 😉
Reader Comments (20)
I can’t disagree with you, Brian, about Articulate being an awesome company. The part about me being cool, however, is certainly debatable.
Thanks for all your great help and insight. The new copy really helps convey what we already knew about ourselves, but didn’t know quite how to share. We’re very proud of the copy.
Adam
Don’t be modest, Adam. You know you’re cool. 😉
Perhaps, but isn’t modesty the new cool? 😉
Thanks for helping us with the excellent copy, Brian! We’re all really excited about the new site. It was hard work, but well worth the effort.
And Adam’s not a bad guy to have as a boss, either. 🙂
Awesome job on the Articulate copy and layout! That is pretty much a paradigm of…uhh…Web 2.0 copy and design.
Yes, but taking that style and applying it to a hugely profitable “non-web 2.0” company makes it fresh and new. Have you seen most corporate websites?
Lame.
Let’s hope they never make TechCrunch. Oh wait, I already said they were profitable, so no worries.
I think I misused the word paradigm. Looking it up in the dictionary, it see that it suggests something is “typical”, rather than a “role model.” What I wanted to say was, “Corporations take note: this is model of how Web 2.0 copywriting & design should be.”
What’s the right word for that?
benchmark, touchstone, standard, yardstick?
Constructive criticism re the homepage of the Art site.
For me the quote at the top of the page is far too large, and so are the graphics below. I say this because when I looked at the site this morning I never realised that there was anything below the fold, using a 19″ monitor with normal size font.
Then, this afternoon I went back to this site to re-read the article and had another look at the Art site, it was only then that I saw I could scroll and was amazed at just how much more info was lurking below the fold.
My advice for what it’s worth is make the top quote much smaller, bring down the font size a touch, make the software box graphics smaller and also show above the fold the main heading – Empowering Rapid E-Learning.
Then have all the other stuff.
Hope this helps, free usability testing!
That Articulate product looks pretty empressive. I may have to put it to the test just so I can compare it to the functionality of Camtasia Studio.
Regards
Shane
Sorry…”I”mpressive (unlike my spelling).
Thanks for the feedback, Alexander! We’ll take that into consideration.
Shane- Many of our customers use Camtasia to complement content they create with our products. For example, a screen recording you create with Camtasia can be published as Flash and embedded in Articulate Presenter as one slide in a course. I think you’ll find that Camtasia and Presenter are very different products. There are lots of references to Camtasia in our forums (like here).
Ok. Thanks Gabe. I’ll look into your forums.
Regards
Shane
First of all great stuff. You instantly know what the company is about within 5 seconds of viewing the home page.
A few quick questions:
Did you personally redesign the pages?
Was the design done before the copy was written, and if so, did you see the redesign to make your content work with the design?
Did someone else redesign the site once you had the content written?
Either way I think it’s very impressive. It all works very well together.
Great Job!!
I sent over 800 referrals to the sales letter during the past 6 months with no sales so I found myself pulling the banner from my site yesterday actually.
The SEO Book sales letter, in itself, is not bad.
But I guess the problem is it really looks and smells like all those “get-rich-quick” books’ sales copies. The content is engineered, that’s for sure. Maybe the presentation is what makes it feel like this.
Then again, those get-rich-quick books DO sell, don’t they? 🙂
I’m not an expert on copywriting so maybe I’m just mumbling but I wanted to share my feelings about it.
Make sure you go look at what the SEO Book sales page looked like before… from your comments, I’m guessing you haven’t. 😉
🙂 I certainly did. The old one is not even worth talking about here and the new one is certainly better than that. But, that doesn’t make it feel less get-rich-quickish for me 🙂
This article's comments are closed.