Is a picture really worth a thousand words?
We all know that a picture can be worth a thousand words, but it’s not always the case. Words are the most fundamental blocks of our communication. To prove this Jeff Sexton at Future Now asked, “What happens when you take the words away?”
Jeff used the website www.netdisaster.com to suck out all of the text from amazon.com. Well we did a little experimenting of our own, and you can see the results here.
Take the simple high conversion online shopping and lead generation website apcups.com.au. Here’s a screenshot of it without the words:
It’s not very useful. If you look at the site with the words, you get the picture (pun intended).
It’s strange that words are so often overlooked in a website project. We often see that copywriting is kept in house or left out of a website project altogether. Others tell us that people don’t read websites, but a demonstration like this reveals that people depend on what’s written!
When we are selling a new website in a competitive situation, we usually find that our competitors are only offering a web design and a content management system. Most don’t take any interest in actually creating the content and the copy for the website. Strange really, because it’s the words that actually make the website work.
From the author: As a web programmer I have been involved in developing several content management systems. I was hands on in developing our own content management suite called eComMetrix®.
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