Websites in the wild
A case study on writing a website narrative
I’ve been lucky as a copywriter. I’ve had the chance to work with people whose ideas challenge me to think in different ways and whose missions I’m in awe of. One of those companies was a small, Netherlands-based arts funding consultancy that wanted to reach an international audience.
I can feel you rubbing your hands together in anticipation already. EU funding and funding laws? What, pray tell, could be more exciting than that?
Actually, that was my job. To make your eyeballs interested enough in this small company’s big ideas to stick around and interact with their site.
Here’s how I approached the challenge.
1. Write an effective intro.
Websites in the wild live short and brutish lives. Competition for eyeballs is measured in milliseconds. My character, BECCA Europe, in other words, needed an opening chapter that would stop eyeballs.
If I’d been writing on autopilot, I might have focused on who BECCA was (about) or even what it believed in (mission). Instead, I chose to hit the reader with what the company had achieved that year because I felt it was just the type of thing BECCA’s visitors would respond to. (The figures below were updated to reflect the website as it is today.)
In 2021, we helped our clients raise over €13 million to fund their creative projects.
Company backstories are nice, but as they say on Wall Street, money talks.
If I were a visitor with a creative project with a budget in that ballpark, would I keep reading? Would you?
I think so. But only if there was a good incentive.
2. Give readers a problem to solve.
The intro to BECCA’s website presents a fact that would presumably be engaging for the type of visitor that ended up there. That was my hook. But that wasn’t enough.
It’s common enough to put a call to action (CTA) under website intro text. I could have put a cookie-cutter “learn more” or “read more” button there. Instead, I framed the fact within a larger narrative whose payoff was only a click away.
This is how.
If you were interested enough to stick with me through the opening line, I’m banking on the fact that you’ll give BECCA five more seconds of your time and click to find out how they raised that money. That’s already five more seconds than most websites get.
Here’s how it all came together after I designed the page around the text.
3. Control the narrative.
Like stories, web narratives have to be built. They aren’t slapped together, even though it sometimes feels that way.
For BECCA, I took the elements they wanted in their story and thought about how they could best be combined on the home page, which is where you have the most space for a unified narrative on a website. Of course, not everyone “reads” a website that way. Some “cheat” and click on different “chapters” (tabs) at will. If you do read a website, however, you do it vertically.
After the eyeball-grabbing intro, I thought the next thing a potential client would want to see were some of the people BECCA had actually helped, so I added a logo slider.
This wasn’t just filler. Creativity and collaboration are reinforced here. BECCA isn’t just a funding consultancy — it’s a company that works with creative, trailblazing organizations to produce very cool, very vital things.
If that wasn’t apparent with the logos in the slider, I made it crystal clear in BECCA’s signature red with a few select testimonials. FYI, powerful testimonials shouldn’t be afterthoughts and they don’t need to be appended to the bottom of your website.
4. Make characters with stories, not images with text.
If we go back to the very beginning of our story (light years ago in eyeball time), I mentioned a CTA, or button text. If you were so excited by our hook and already clicked, you were in for a big surprise, because that button didn’t take you to a contact form. That would be cheating.
If you clicked, you dropped down to the company stories section, which for me was the most compelling part of the homepage narrative. It’s BECCA’s meat and your payoff and what I, the website creator, envisioned as the real decider. If you chose to work with BECCA, you’d definitely do it after reading those stories.
Here’s why.
Instead of framing BECCA’s business as “funding projects,” I wrote them as “people projects.” Each of BECCA’s clients was a character looking for something, all of them with relatable visions, whether it was OUTtv, Holland’s only LGBTQI TV station, seeking the budget they needed to continue broadcasting, or Keychange, a global network looking to promote more female musicians. These are real, impactful stories, each with characters and a story arc of its own.
Stories thrive as communication tools because they hit us logically with well-trodden structures and emotionally by pulling on our heartstrings. Story arcs with powerful intros, problems to solve, and payoffs when you solve them aren’t creative — they’re functional.
In this case, all of BECCA’s stories had the same ending: BECCA believed in what these organizations did and helped them secure the funding they needed to sustain their visions.
Happy endings are nice outside Hollywood, too.
5. Don’t overwrite.
This blog post clocks in at 1,000 words, which is about how many words you need to write a whole website.
Obviously, since we’re competing for that Darwinian eyeball window any time we publish something on the web, whether it’s static content or a blog, it’s better to trim the fat.
After all, it was Kurt Vonnegut who said that anything you put in a story either has to develop the character or advance the plot. This holds true for website writing, too.
To recap, BECCA’s website has an engaging intro with a carrot that leads users to explore more of its best content. It’s been carefully structured to give visitors the right information when they need it, using familiar sections in slightly different order. And it ends with a reward visitors can relate to: stories about real people, not collections of stats.
It does all of that in a handful of words.
How about yours?
