Web Site Design by David Rutstein from A to Z

Most copywriters are employees within organizations such as advertising agencies, public relations firms, company advertising departments, large stores, marketing firms, broadcasters and cable providers, newspapers, book publishers and magazines. Copywriters can also be independent contractors who freelance for a variety of clients, at the clients’ offices or working from their own, or partners or employees in a specialized copywriting agency. Such agencies combine copywriting services with a range of editorial and associated services that may include positioning and messaging consulting, social media and SEO consulting, developmental editing, and copy editing, proofreading, fact checking, layout, and design. A copywriting agency most often serves large corporations.

A copywriter usually works as part of a creative team. Advertising agencies partner copywriters with art directors. The copywriter has ultimate responsibility for the advertisement’s verbal or textual content, which often includes receiving the copy information from the client. The copywriter is responsible for telling the story, crafting it in such a way that it resonates with the viewer/reader, ideally producing an emotional response[1]. The art director has ultimate responsibility for visual communication and, particularly in the case of print work, may oversee production. Although, in many instances, either person may come up with the overall idea for the advertisement or commercial (typically referred to as the concept or “big idea”), and the process of collaboration often improves the work.

Copywriters are similar to technical writers and the careers may overlap. Broadly speaking, however, technical writing is dedicated to informing readers rather than persuading them. For example, a copywriter writes an ad to sell a car, while a technical writer writes the operator’s manual explaining how to use it.

Because the words sound alike, copywriters are sometimes confused with people who work in copyright law. These careers are unrelated.

Famous copywriters include David Ogilvy, William Bernbach and Leo Burnett. Many creative artists spent some of their career as copywriters before becoming famous for other things, including Peter Carey, Dorothy L. Sayers, Eric Ambler, Joseph Heller, Terry Gilliam, William S. Burroughs, Salman Rushdie, Don DeLillo, Lawrence Kasdan, Fay Weldon, Philip Kerr and Shigesato Itoi. (Herschell Gordon Lewis, on the other hand, became famous for directing violent exploitation films, then became a very successful copywriter.)

The Internet has expanded the range of copywriting opportunities to include web content, ads, emails and other online media. It has also brought new opportunities for copywriters to learn their craft, conduct research and view others’ work. And the Internet has made it easier for employers, copywriters and art directors to find each other.

As a consequence of these factors, along with increased use of independent contractors and virtual commuting generally, freelancing has become a more viable job option, particularly in certain copywriting specialties and markets. A generation ago, professional freelance copywriters (except those between full-time jobs) were rare.

While education may be a good start or supplement in a budding copywriter’s professional education, working as part of an advertising team arguably remains the best way for novices to gain the experience and business sense required by many employers, and expands the range of career opportunities.

Creating your own website can be useful for a number of purposes. Whether it’s to share your expertise on a particular topic, start an online business, foster a community, or just maintain an online journal of your activities, having a website will allow you to make your content accessible from any connected computer. It can also theoretically allow you to have a larger audience for your ideas than you would ever have otherwise. If you have useful ideas or observations to share, you may be able to share them with as many as a few dozen people throughout the day, if you are lucky. With a website, you can share them with hundreds or even thousands.

Possibly the easiest way to create your own website is to use an online site creation tool. These services often provide intuitive interfaces for adding text, images, links, and other bits of content to a webpage. Many of these tools have a WYSIWYG web design platform, which means “What You See is What You Get” — what you create in the design interface is what your visitors will see.

If you want more options and functionality on your website, as well as your own dedicated web address, you’ll need to create pages in HTML, register a web domain, and get a hosting server to upload your pages to. Web domains can be registered at any number of registrars — Godaddy.com is a popular one. Search for “hosting” or “cheap hosting” to find many thousands of available hosting companies. As a general rule of thumb, if you’re paying more than about $10 US dollars (USD) per month for hosting for a low-traffic website, you’re paying way too much. Many companies offer space for even less.

To create HTML, you can write it from scratch in notepad, or use a WYSIWYG software program. HTML is not a programming language per se, and as such is much easier to use than true programming languages. You can learn basic HTML in less than an hour and start using it to create your very own web pages.

After you create your pages, they must be uploaded to your server. You will receive a username and password from your host once you register with them. You can use these in an application called an FTP program to connect your computer with the server, then send your completed pages from computer to server. Once uploaded, your website will be visible on the World Wide Web for all to enjoy. Within a few days, pages with inbound links will be indexed by major search engines and begin to appear in search results.

Web design is used as a general term to describe any of the various tasks involved in creating a web page. More specifically, it refers to jobs focused on building the front-end of a web page.

The web consists of myriad pages, presenting information using different technologies and linked together with hyperlinks. There are two basic aspects to any web page found on the Internet. The first is a presentation that the user interacts with, usually visually, while the second is a back-end that includes information for non-human browsers.

The basic markup language used to tell a browser how to present information is called the HyperText Markup Language (HTML). A stricter version of HTML is also widely used, known as eXtensible HyperText Markup Language (XHTML). Using HTML or XHTML, a web designer is able to tell a browser how a web page should appear. In the last few years there has been a push towards separating the underlying structure of a web-page (using HTML) from the visual presentation of the site (using Cascading Style Sheets or CSS). This approach has a number of major benefits in both the short and long term, and is gathering popularity as time progresses.

From a technical standpoint, the act of web design can be quite difficult. Unlike more traditional print media, HTML has a number of variable factors. To begin with, not all browsers interpret HTML according to the standards created by the standard-setting body — the World Wide Web Consortium, also known as W3. This means that while one piece of web design will appear as the designer wishes it to in one browser, it may appear completely differently in another. There are numerous fixes and work-arounds to try to circumvent browser-specific bugs, but it is a tenuous business at best.

Another major limiting factor of web design is the plethora of formats a site might be viewed in. While graphic designers know exactly how large the piece of paper they are printing on will be, a web designer must account for different monitor sizes, different display settings, and even browsers for non-sighted surfers! Combined, these concerns often leave a web designer struggling to incorporate enough dynamism to make a web page attractive on a range of browser sizes, while creating a layout static enough to allow for the use of images and other necessarily fixed-size components.

In addition to XHTML and CSS, web designers often use a number of database driven languages to allow for more dynamism and interactivity on their websites. While useful with smaller sites, database driven languages become a virtual necessity on any site presenting huge amounts of data. Some of the most popular languages for ‘dynamic’ web design include ASP, PHP, and ColdFusion. Macromedia’s Flash also allows for a different sort of web design and is very popular amongst many web designers.

The possibilities for web design are virtually limitless, although at one point they were quite constrained by the boundaries of the browser itself. With the advent and flexibility of Flash and other embedded technologies, these boundaries have been all but removed, allowing for a versatility and dynamism that challenges the imagination of anyone interested in web design.