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How to write your own website text when you are not a writer

Write down what you say on the phone to a customer who asks what you do, then remove the parts you only added because it is a website. That is the text. The most common failure is not bad writing, it is writing that sounds like a company instead of like the person the customer will actually meet.

Cosmin TiuFounder, PROOF482 min read

01Start from what you already say out loud

You have explained your business a thousand times. That explanation is better than anything you will write staring at a blank page.

  • Record yourself answering: what do you do, for whom, and why you rather than the next one.
  • Transcribe it and cut the filler. What remains is usually most of the homepage.
  • Keep the specific numbers you say naturally: years, guarantees, how long a job takes.
  • Write the way you speak. If you would not say it to a customer's face, do not put it on the page.

02Phrases to delete on sight

These appear on almost every small business site and none of them survive a reader deciding whether to call you.

  • Welcome to our website. The visitor knows where they are.
  • We offer a wide range of quality services. This describes every business that has ever existed.
  • Passionate about excellence. Nobody has ever chosen a supplier for this.
  • Innovative, dynamic, professional. Adjectives a competitor could paste onto their own page unchanged.
  • Anything you would be embarrassed to say aloud in your own shop.

03A structure that works for any service page

Same shape every time, so you can write five pages in an evening instead of agonising over one.

  • What it is, in one sentence a customer would recognise.
  • Who it is for, and honestly who it is not for.
  • What happens, step by step, so nobody has to imagine it.
  • What it costs, or the range and what moves it.
  • How long it takes.
  • One next step, and only one.
From a build we shipped

Writing copy for a brand that did not exist yet

Noryse had no name when we started, so there was nothing to describe. We wrote the positioning first, then the tagline, then six product pages, and the product text came out of the material and the construction rather than out of adjectives. That order matters for any business: decide what you are, in plain words, before writing a single page. Copy written before that decision reads as vague because the decision it depends on has not been made.

See the build: Noryse

Questions, answered

How long should a page be?

As long as it takes to answer the questions and not one line more. A page that answers six questions in four hundred words beats one that answers three in two thousand.

Can I use AI to write it?

To structure and tidy what you already said, yes, and it is genuinely useful there. To invent what your business is, no. It will produce something fluent that could belong to any competitor, which is the exact failure you are trying to avoid.

What if I really cannot write it?

Send what you have and we write it. It is included in the build. Waiting until the text is perfect is the single most common reason a website takes six months instead of two days.

Where PROOF48 fits

Copy is included in the 48 hour build. If you have text we clean it up, and if you do not we write it from what you tell us about the business. You are never blocked waiting on a blank page.

Cosmin Tiu · Founder, PROOF48

Building software since 2018. PROOF48 ships business websites in 48 hours and invoices afterwards, which means every opinion here was paid for in builds rather than in theory.

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