How to write copy for your biotech website

Many people underestimate at first the difficulty of writing good copy for their site. But for a lot of web development projects late delivery of copy is the main reason for project delays. This article is an inlead to an article series in which I will walk through the 10 most used page types on biotech websites (see our whitepaper on biotech web development). In each article I will explain why you would use a certain page type and give you ideas/templates that you can work from. Writing good copy is hard for a number of reasons: -It defines your company: Especially for startups it can be hard to write the copy for a website. more so if you haven't worked out a business plan yet. In this case there is a big chance that you will be partially reinventing your company. What kind of company are you? What are your values? How will you give witness of those values on your site? -This is not your profession but you have to do it: Good copy you write yourself, you know your product/company the best. Even if you contract professional copy writers that understand your industry, you will at least have to provide a draft text. -You are writing for a broad public: Your website will be viewed by your investors, customers, competitors, potential future employees, your family,... It is important to have concise understandable copy that will convince the people that find your website to stay long enough to find the pages (if these exist) that are targeted to their specific needs. So how can you get it done? -Do a benchmark study: review what your competition is writing on their website. What pages are they using, how did they label them? What language are they using? Are there industry terms that you could also use in your copy? -Just get started: Personally when I'm not sure how to put something in words, I just start writing no matter if the result is not coherent. After I've written the concepts into sentences I go back and puzzle them together. -First write then be perfect: it's normal that you will end up rewriting your copy several times over. But try to write down a quick draft for all your pages before you do the final polishing. To make your text consistent you will have to review all of it 2-3 times anyway. -Consider hiring a copywriter: especially if you are not writing in your native language you should consider hiring a copywriter. There are some interesting articles on the topic at:

• This post approaches copy writing from a journalist's perspective and has a couple of interesting tips like the "Who, What, Where, When, Why, How".
• The following article at entrepreneur.com has 5 tips to help you write consise text and evade "the copywriting text trap".