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Thanks for the insight into how you write copy for your marketing sites.

I’m in the process of re-writing the way-too-long home page copy for one of my products, and I’m using your various product sites as a model for how to do it right.

I need to get better at doing what Strunk said: “Omit needless words.” Thanks again for the post.

Great post… I think anyone involved in writing copy for print or web can relate to the square-peg into round-hole model of whittling down thoughts.

Very insightful… did you gain anything from explaining your process? Something from that sales copy that you went back and re-wrote yet after another look-see?

Why the change of the existing contacts icon to Apple’s Address Book.app icon?

Twitter has taught me many tricks for brevity. Using ampersands, as you’ve done, is one.

Does anyone else seem to think that the Highrise web site looks like a big Infomercial?

Something about the site, with all due respect, stinks of the infomercial stigma … which is not a good thing

The shorter version actually works a lot better. Even if you didn’t need the space, more efficient communication of an idea is better.

Are you sure “Follow-up on time” is correct English? My OS X dictionary lists “follow-up” only as a noun, not verb. So should it be “Follow up on time”? Or is this an instance where the benefit of writing it with the hyphen, so it’s perceived as one unit, trumps language nitpicking?

Great post. I love editing down to the bare minimum.

Additional shortening of your example can be achieved by removing “Highrise sends…” and changing it to “Receive…” This also creates consistency through a parallel structure with most of the other entries which are active and in the command form: “Forward…”, “Monitor…”, “Maintain…” and so on.

Any plans on reinvesting your vertical space savings? ;)

Was this simply spring cleaning or is there something in the works that requires the extra space, perhaps?

Jeff & Jason:

I’m going to side with the “Highrise sends” on this one – it makes me feel more like the software is doing something instead of me receiving.

A small change yes, but the psychology is totally different.

BTW , really really great post.

Usability interface and navigation issues often stifle the messages provided by many websites…balanced websites regardless of their content are aesthetically pleasing. Great post

This is a super geeky web writing post, which means it’s automatically required reading for my entire staff.

Especially endearing is your use of the serial comma throughout the revised copy, despite character limitations.

Nicely done.

Using Icons as the first step in the writing?

Jason, do you match the icons to copy rather then using copy and then finding the appropriate icons?

Sounds good except for forwarding email to Highrise. “Highrise organizes by contact” is the key part, not the forwarding.

A point of language:

It should really be “Follow up on time”, I think.

“Follow-up” is a noun. The verb form isn’t hyphenated.

So you’d say “I sent Fred a follow-up”, or “I’ll follow up with Fred”.

(You can also use the hyphenated form as an adjective, as in “follow-up interviews”.)

Thanks for this, nice refreshing read!

And, while I’m here, “follow up on time” confused me a bit.

To follow up on something has a particular meaning. “I’ll follow up on yesterday’s meeting.” So how does one follow up on “time”?

The intended meaning (I think) is “follow up, on time”, but my brain didn’t parse it that way when I first read it.

“I didn’t want to shrink the icons or the font sizes. This meant the actual copy was on the chopping block. Almost every paragraph on every page on every piece of paper or every screen can be edited down without losing meaning.”

I think this is a bad approach. Bad design often comes about by fitting copy (or content) into a design. Copy should always come first and the design needs to accommodate that. Otherwise it’s just colour and pictures.

I’m curious to see how much cleaner the design would be without icons used at all.

@Catherine said: “Does anyone else seem to think that the Highrise web site looks like a big Infomercial?”

Completely agree! To me this is a HUGE put-off! It looks like some scam email crap that I see all the time in my inbox.

I’d take anything 37sig guys say with a huge grain of salt. They’re getting a lot of this attention from Rails, and not from their products. If you check the traffic to their sites, it’s abysmal. Clearly, this giant infomercial stuff ain’t working that well.

Hmm. Ampersands. I think they’re good in the headlines, but not good in the paragraph text: in proper/full sentences they’re like obstacles. This hurts my eyes:

ACT !, & Basecamp.

Actually I would reintroduce “and” in place of “&” and turn my attention to unnecessary punctuation. Each of those paragraphs is a single sentence so I’d prune the closing full-stop. And I’d also kill the comma before each &/and.

Great article though!

This maybe a little too meta, but I am curious why you took the links out of the revised version. I maybe would have clicked on the Highrise Tasks link had I been browsing. I guess my main question is whether it had to do with the writing changing or did you feel the links were not important anymore?

Did you think of A/B testing these changes to see which had the stronger effect on your bottom line?

I wonder also whether there might be some negative SEO effects of losing some of your keywords.

Very interesting experiment.

I’m with @Jaanus and @Pete Yandell: it should certainly be ‘follow up’ rather than follow-up.

Great post.

Unfortunately, the effort is only worth it if you’re working on a unilingual site.

Lately, I’ve been working on the copywrite of hyggelig.org (in German and English), and I tweaked until I like either one. Then someone sent me a patch for an Italian version.

It’s really a trade-off between serving more languages or better copywrite. By the way, if anyone is willing to contribute another locale, fork away!

First thing I noticed when I went to the Highrise site was that all of those feature points fit within the first page of my widescreen laptop. Very well done!

Skillfully done.

Note how much harder it is to write tight text. (And how much discussion and commenting it takes to talk about doing so.)

Hard to convince clients, however, that writing eleven trim sentences costs more than four screens of chatter.

The revised version is much more visually appealing and concise. Nice work!

Thank you to those who pointed out the “follow-up” vs. “follow up” issue. And I totally agree with Stuart about the use of ampersands in copy – I don’t know how “&” ended up in prose at all.

Thanks for this. It truly is an uphill battle getting usable copy onto websites sometimes, so it’s lovely to see people making an effort.

Could have been shorter.

Interesting, but I’m left wondering: What was the reasoning behind the decision to make everything fit in smaller space? Has your A/B testing shown that smaller is better, or was there other reasons?

Thanks a lot for the insights! It really helps!