Rewriting your own website is harder than writing for a client. Here's what we learned when we overhauled the Purple Donut Studios site — and why we now treat copywriting as inseparable from web design.
Writing for a client is easy compared to writing for yourself. When we rebuilt the Purple Donut Studios site, the hardest part wasn't the design or the development. It was figuring out what to say, and then being honest enough to say it plainly.
Here's what we learned.
The previous Purple Donut site was visually strong. The copy was not. It was showy, full of language that sounded impressive but said very little. The headlines were polished but vague. The tone was confident without being credible.
We were positioning ourselves as the obvious answer before we had even acknowledged the question.
Every page was essentially "we're great" without addressing what a prospective client was actually worried about. No proof points. No acknowledgment of their situation. Just us, loudly.
Web users are skeptical of promotional language. Our old site was a good example of why. It read like a pitch, not a resource, and visitors could tell.
Before we rewrote a single page, we rebuilt our voice from scratch. That meant a fairly long, deliberate process: articulating what Purple Donut actually sounds like, what words we reach for, what we avoid, what makes our writing feel like us and not like a template.
The goal was to create something flexible enough that anyone on the team could write for Purple Donut, but consistent enough that you'd recognize the voice no matter who wrote it. That document became the foundation. Everything else was built on top of it.
Once we knew how we sounded, the real work was deciding what to say. What belongs on the homepage? What does a service page actually need to do? What should we cut entirely?
These are content strategy questions, not copywriting questions, and they take longer to answer. The writing, once the strategy was clear, came relatively quickly. It was the thinking before the writing that took the most time.
Research from the Nielsen Norman Group found that 79% of web users scan any new page they come across — only 16% read word by word. That's not a reason to dumb your site down. It's a reason to be ruthless about what you put in front of people's eyes.
Our old site had scannable elements. Headlines, short sections, visual hierarchy. But the headlines said things like "Services" and "Our Work." They were scannable and empty. If someone's eye lands on a heading and it tells them nothing, the scan fails. We rewrote every heading to carry real information, to answer the question a visitor was already asking before they got there.
Most of what we drafted in the first pass was too long. Not because we were padding, but because we kept trying to cover everything. The instinct when writing about your own work is to add context, to explain, to justify. Readers don't need any of that. They need to find the answer to one question fast: is this for me?
Cutting to that answer is the hardest part of web copywriting. It's also the most important.
We didn't always offer copywriting as part of our web practice. We built the sites. Clients handled the words.
That changed when we kept watching good design undercut by weak copy, and weak copy undercut by misaligned strategy. The three are inseparable. A well-designed page with generic copy still doesn't convert. A site built around the right message, in the right voice, for the right audience does.
We've had clients tell us we knew how to tell their story better than they could. That's not a line we expected to be known for. It's one we've come to take seriously.
If you're rebuilding your site and want to think through the copy alongside the design, we'd be glad to be part of that conversation.
