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When was the last time you put out a product brochure or press release without thinking about what it said?

When you create a prospectus or sales brochure you get the copy written by a professional – either in-house or a contracted copywriter. Do you put that amount of care into the copy on your web site? If so, well done you can ignore the rest.

Your web site may be the first contact a potential business partner or customer has with you. It should get far more readers than your paper material. So you should put at least as much resource into getting the copy right.

Web copy is different from print copy. It works differently. People interact with it differently. It needs to behave in many ways unique to this medium; not many brochures get syndicated and refactored for delivery on other brochures in real time without you knowing it do they?

Your copy must stand alone. It carries your message. It sells your property, fills your leases and shifts your units. If it doesn’t do the job sitting typed on a side of A4 it won’t do it on your web site – no matter how cool your designer thinks s/he is.

Make sure the copy for your site does what you need it to do, wherever you get it. Only then think about enhancing the message with design. Once that is done you have the core of a web site, so start improving conversion through experimentation and structure. Once all of that is done you can think about web toys. By then you may not want them.

It is a little known fact that I wrote one of the earliest JavaScript WYSIWYG editors for IE4. It sucked. But it was better than anything else available at the time. It even did tables and forms (wow, I hear you ironise, but this is going back 6 or 7 years).

The little embedded WYSIWYG editor tries to make the transition from nasty word processors to nasty web pages easy for people. They fail pretty much without exception. Part of the problem is that browser implementation sucks; part is that website and CMS developers suck (yep, that’s me); and part is that content producers are lazy hacks.

The main issue though is that online what you see is never what you get. And nor should it be. Even if all browsers rendered HTML and CSS according to a properly written and unambiguous specification we would still have variation in appearance. Screen resolution, default fonts, viewport size, other types of user agents, user style sheets, the list is endless.

What can we do? Well first of all, live with it. Variation is not just inevitable it is a good thing. Make content clear and free of formatting so it can be refactored and rendered by all sorts of user agents. Get CSS to do its job. Use something like Markdown or Textile instead of a WYSIWYG editor and live with the limitations.

What can content producers do? Write well using language for emphasis, source appropriate media and structure your content for maximum impact. This makes the silly formatting tricks which are the province of the WYSIWYG editor unnecessary. Plan your content and introduce some consistency; this helps usability as well as making the publishing process easier. Finally, learn just a little bit of whatever flavour of (X)HTML your site uses. The content producers at AIA use a small subset of XHTML 1.0 and hand code almost everything. They are writers not web developers. They know enough to get the job done, rather than enough to be dangerous.