Website copywriting, written with the design

Oxford is a city built around reading, writing and publishing. Oxford University Press has its headquarters on Walton Street in Jericho, and there are many smaller academic, educational and specialist publishers around the county. People here notice good prose. They also notice bad prose: vague claims, padded introductions and pages that never quite say what the business does. For an Oxford business website, the words carry more weight than almost anywhere else.

Who this is for

• Professional firms in Summertown and the city centre whose services are hard to describe without jargon.
• Science and engineering companies that need technical work explained for non-specialists.
• Clinics and practices that need plain, calm language patients can follow.
• Shops, cafés and guest houses that want the warmth of the place to come through on a phone screen.
• Anyone redesigning a site whose existing copy has grown by accretion over many years.

Why words come first

When a design is drawn before the copy exists, the words end up squeezed into boxes. Headings get cut to fit, important detail is dropped, and pages look full but say little. We reverse the order. A draft of each page's copy exists before design begins, so layouts are built around real content and the right amount of it. This is the single biggest difference between our web design process and a template build.

What is included, step by step

1. Reading. Your current site, brochures, proposals, emails to customers and anything else that shows how you already explain yourself.
2. Interview. One to two hours with the people who know the business best, recorded so we can quote you accurately.
3. Questions research. What customers actually ask, from your inbox, your sales team and the searches people make locally.
4. Page plan. Each page's job, its reader and the questions it must answer, agreed before drafting.
5. First draft of every page, including headings, calls to action and form wording.
6. One round of your edits, gathered in a single shared document so comments do not conflict.
7. Final edit for length, tone and consistency, and a short style note your team can follow later.

What we write

Page	What it needs to do	Typical length
Home	Say who you are, who you help and what to do next, in the first screen	500 to 1,000 words
Service pages	Explain what is included, who it suits, how it works, what affects cost, common questions	800 to 1,500 words
About	Why the business exists and how you work, without inventing a story	400 to 800 words
Location or sector pages	Genuinely useful local or sector detail, never thin duplicates	600 to 1,000 words
Microcopy	Buttons, form labels, errors and confirmation emails	A few words each, but they matter

How long it takes

For a small business site of eight to twelve pages, copywriting usually runs over three to five weeks alongside the design, most of it waiting for interviews and feedback. Larger sites, or sites with technical review steps, take longer. Editing existing copy is faster, often one to two weeks.

What drives the cost

• Number of distinct pages, rather than total words. Ten service pages that share a structure are faster than ten unrelated pages.
• Subject difficulty. Technical, legal or clinical subjects need more research and review.
• Review layers. Every extra approver adds a round.
• Starting point. Editing good existing copy costs less than writing from nothing.

Common mistakes

• Opening with the company, not the customer. "Founded in" is rarely the most useful first sentence.
• Superlatives instead of specifics. "Leading" and "bespoke solutions" tell the reader nothing.
• Writing for search engines with repeated phrases that read badly aloud.
• Hiding prices or cost drivers when that is the first thing people want to know.
• Vague calls to action such as "find out more" instead of saying what happens next.
• Leaving microcopy to the developer, which is how forms end up saying "Submit".

Tone for different Oxford audiences

One house voice does not suit every reader. A Summertown law firm needs measured, precise sentences and clear statements of what is and is not included. A Cowley Road restaurant can be warmer and shorter. A Harwell space company writing for agencies and engineers needs exactness above all. We agree the tone early, with two or three example paragraphs, so the whole site is written in a voice you recognise before the bulk of the drafting begins.

How we keep it honest

We do not write claims you cannot back up. No invented statistics, no reviews we have not seen, no promises of results. Good copy for a professional firm in Oxford is usually modest in tone and specific in detail, and that is more persuasive than superlatives.

Keeping it fresh after launch

Copy dates quickly when services, prices or people change. At handover we leave a short style note covering spelling, tone, preferred terms and words to avoid, so anyone on your team can add a page that sounds like the rest of the site. We can also review new pages periodically as part of a care plan.

How we measure it

Copy works if people understand it and act on it. After launch we look at whether visitors reach the pages that matter, how far they read, and whether enquiries mention what the site said. We also ask your team whether the questions they field on the phone have changed. Often the clearest sign is fewer people asking the same basic questions.

Written for search, read by people

Every page is planned around the questions people actually type into search engines, and the words are chosen so the page answers them directly. But it is written to be read aloud without embarrassment. If a sentence only exists for a search engine, it does not belong on the page. Our journal piece on writing for expert readers goes further into structure and tone, and the same principles apply to the accessible websites we build.