Since most small to mid-sized businesses don’t have an in-house editorial team …or marketing department …or even web team, web content review often falls on an already stretched business owner to provide constructive feedback on the first draft of content received from their web copywriter.

In the interest of time (of which they have little), they invariably break the first cardinal rule of web content review as they bravely take on the company’s role of de facto editor:

“Thou Shalt Not Forward The First Draft Of Web Content To Staff, Friends And Family For Feedback And Comments”

In the business owner’s defense, their rationale is sound. After all, colleagues and internal staff know the business inside out and should be able to provide constructive criticism on the information presented, while non-industry friends and family can give honest feedback on whether or not they “liked” the writing itself.

The problem, in the end, is that each member of this hodgepodge review team brings his/her own bias to the editorial process making it more convoluted and less constructive than the business owner ever intended it to be.

De facto editorial teams typically:

- Extend the content phase of the web development process; and can,
- Skew the design and messaging off course entirely.

Here’s why:

All successful website projects must start by defining the main goal or purpose of the website. Simply having a website because “everyone else has one” doesn’t really qualify as a quantifiable objective against which you can measure results.

A website’s purpose may be to increase brand awareness, build customer relationships, provide information, or serve as an additional sales channel thus predominantly dictating web content requirements including choice of tone and style to “speak” to the identified target audience for whom the website is intended.

Nota Bene: Your website’s purpose drives your web content — and your web content drives everything else including the design and site navigation structure.

So, when a well-intentioned business owner shares the first draft of web content with a group of “editors” who were not involved in defining the website’s goal or messaging in the first place, the comments and feedback received are of limited value at this stage of the editorial process.

Reality Check:

- Staff often have a myopic view of the company as filtered through the lens of their own day-to-day jobs and experiences.

- Friends and family have varied experiences that can alter their perception of the content focusing in on style, tone, and grammar instead of key messaging and positioning.

- Staff, board members, friends and family are often not your target audience.

- Few are versed in the usability aspects of web content (text is scanned – not read; web pages aren’t sequential; SEO alters sentence structure and vocabulary choice; etc.)

- Fewer still recognize that writing for the web is different than writing for print (which, right away, negates the comments from a next door neighbour who happens to be a Pulitzer Prize winning journalist, or a sister who writes children’s books in her spare time)

This is why, business owners who share the first draft of their web content with too many unqualified individuals (i.e. those who were not privy to the initial web strategy planning meetings) typically end up getting confused and being forced off course by trying to amalgamate all feedback into one cohesive content solution.

This leads to either additional revision cycles, or worse, unnecessary rewrites at the expense of a project’s budget, timeline …and ultimate goal.

Solution:

- Include all relevant staff and/or colleagues during initial website strategy meetings. These individuals will then form your editorial review team for the first draft of content. Team members should include all business partners (stakeholders/decision makers), as well as representatives from marketing, sales, admin and/or IT (if feasible/applicable).

- Include the web copywriter in all discussions pertaining to the web development project, especially those involving strategy, branding, and design.

- Wait until the 2nd or final draft before soliciting input from other colleagues, staff, board members, friends and family.

Websites are as much about creative expression as they are about functional information delivery. From the look and feel to the style and tone, it’s easy to get swayed by personal preference. By focusing on the website’s purpose and target audience, web content review becomes much more about “hitting the mark” with respect to positioning and messaging …than about shivers on the back of the neck subjectively-induced from reading well-written prose.