Plenty of specialist firms write their websites for people like themselves. The person checking yours out is usually someone else.
Your name comes up. A client recommends you, or you’ve landed on a shortlist, and before anyone picks up the phone somebody looks you up. For an engineering firm that might be a commercial manager or a project director from another discipline.
For a law firm or an accountancy practice it might be a finance director, or a founder who has never needed your kind of help before. They want to know whether you’ve done this kind of work before and whether they can trust you with it. Most of them won’t wade through a page of technical language to find out.
In Summary
- The people checking your website often don’t share your professional background
- Pages that open with methods, standards or terminology lose them before they reach your best work
- Put a plain answer at the top of each page and the technical depth underneath it
- Clear website copywriting doesn’t cost you anything with the experts
Who actually reads a specialist firm’s website?
A lot of specialist work arrives through repeat clients and referrals rather than a cold search. So for many firms the website works like a reference check. People go there once your name is already in the frame.
Who that person is changes from job to job. Take an engineering firm. One week it’s a quantity surveyor comparing three subcontractors. The next it’s a client who knows their own field inside out but not yours, or a graduate deciding where to apply. Sometimes it’s an engineer who heads straight for the detail, but you can’t build every page around them.
It isn’t only engineering. Plenty of people reading a solicitor’s website have never needed one before, and an IT consultancy’s site may well be read first by whoever signs off the budget.
Recruitment readers are easy to forget, too. We’ve covered that side in why recruitment starts on your website.
Who were the last few people to mention your website to you, and what were they trying to find out?
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Where technical copy loses people
Specialists write precisely. In a tender or a formal letter of advice that’s exactly what you want. On a website it can work against you, because a page that opens with methods and standards answers questions the reader hasn’t asked yet.
The question they arrived with is simpler. Can these people handle a problem like ours?
If the first screen doesn’t answer it, most visitors won’t go digging. They’ll skim the page and leave with a vague impression. The detail that would have won them over is still sitting further down the page.
Abbreviations and trade terms make it worse. RAMS and CDM are standard terms in construction, the way disbursements are in a law firm. To someone outside the trade they can mean nothing. Spell them out the first time, or move them lower down.
What does a page that works for both look like?
You don’t have to dumb anything down. Most of the fix is the order things appear in.
Open each page with a plain answer in a sentence or two. Say what you do and the kind of job where you’re at your best. Then let the technical detail follow for anyone who wants it. The specialist reader still finds everything they came for, just a little further down.
Take an engineering firm’s groundworks page. Many start with a list of piling techniques. Compare that with an opening like this: “We design and build the foundations everything else depends on, often on tight city sites where the building next door can’t move an inch.” The piling methods, capacities and accreditations still go on the page. They just come second.
Read the first two sentences of your main services page to someone outside your industry. Could they tell you what you do?
Is your best proof easy to find?
On most specialist websites the proof is already there. Projects, accreditations, client work, years in business. The trouble is where it sits. It’s three clicks deep, or only linked from one team’s page.
A visitor shouldn’t need to understand how your company is organised to find your best work. Make case studies reachable from every page and let people filter them by the type of work, not by the department that delivered it. Put your accreditations where a buyer would expect to see them, rather than only on a certifications page.
How you write those case studies up matters as well. We wrote about telling project stories properly with engineering firms in mind, but the advice holds for any sector. This is the step before that: making sure people can get to them at all.
A two minute test
Find someone outside your field. Someone from your accounts team will do. Give them your website and two minutes.
Then ask them what you do and which piece of work on the site impressed them most. Wherever they hesitate is where a page needs a plain answer at the top.
If you suspect your website mainly makes sense to people in your own field, we’re happy to take a look with you. We can help with the words as well as the design. Give us a call on 0800 690 6250 or drop us a message.
About Lemongrass Media
Lemongrass Media is a boutique website design agency based in Milton Keynes. We design corporate websites that look great, work hard and deliver real results for your business.
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