The Importance of Copy and Imagery to a Web Design

2018 marks a milestone for Platform81. This year is P81’s tenth year in business, and one of the ways this occasion has been marked is with a full overhaul of the website.

As the freelance copywriter hired to help out on this project, I’ve been asked to explain some of the decisions behind this re-launch. I could spend hours explaining all of the site design choices the team made when it came to the site’s architecture and layout, or the hard work the developers put in bringing the design vision to life.

Instead, I’d like to cover two aspects of the site that are often overlooked.

The imagery and the copy. 

Why Copy and Imagery Are So Often an Afterthought

In most web projects, copy and imagery end up at the back of the queue. The conversations at the start of the website design stage tend to focus on layouts, colours, navigation, and functionality. These are important decisions, but they often crowd out two elements that have just as much influence over whether a visitor trusts you, stays on the page, and eventually gets in touch.

Treating them as finishing touches, things to sort once the “real” design work is done, is a mistake. They are central to the user experience, and getting them wrong can undermine everything else on the page.

Why Copy Is More Than Just Words on a Page

Good website copy does something that no amount of clever layout can do on its own. It gives a business a voice.

Every company has a personality, built up over years of real interactions with clients, colleagues, and the wider world. The challenge with a website is translating that personality into written content that feels genuine rather than generic. Anyone who has browsed a page stuffed with phrases like “bespoke end-to-end solutions” or “industry-leading expertise” will know how quickly corporate language creates distance rather than connection.

How Platform81 Defined Their Tone of Voice

For the Platform81 rebrand, that kind of language was never an option. Rather than reaching for safe, interchangeable agency copy, the team started with a simple question. Not what do we want to say, but how do we want to sound?

After an initial meeting, three principles shaped everything that followed. Confident in their skills, but never boastful. Open and friendly, but never fake. Grounded, but with big ideas. The shorthand we landed on was “Northern Charm,” and every headline, every service page description, and every team bio was written against that benchmark.

The practical effect is a website that sounds like the people behind it. Read it aloud and you get a reasonable impression of how the team speak when they answer the phone. That is exactly what well-written copy should achieve.

Using The “Northern Charm” 

With the visual personality set and sorted, attention turned to the wording on the website. Writing engaging top-line copy takes real skill. Everyone on the team had their own ideas, but Platform81 brought in some outside help to make sure they could really nail their tone of voice.

After looking at a few options, a decision was made to hire someone from a few miles down the road that provided copywriting services. Yours truly, Andrew from 603 Copywriting.

In my initial meeting, we agreed on a few ground rules for the brand tone of voice. Confident in their skills, but never boastful. Open and friendly, but never fake. Grounded, but with big ideas.

During our planning meeting, this tone was labelled “Northern Charm,” and I think that sums up Platform81 pretty well. Luckily for someone with lots to write on a tight deadline, they agreed!

If you read the Platform81 website out loud, you’ll have a good idea of how they sound when they pick up the phone (allowing for accents), and that’s the mark of any good tone of voice.

Why Imagery Carries Just as Much Weight

Photography and visual content carry the same weight as words, sometimes more. Visitors process images before they read a single sentence, which means the wrong imagery can set the wrong expectation before your copy has even had a chance to land.

The most common mistake businesses make is defaulting to stock photography. Brushed aluminium desks, frameless glass offices, models in suits shaking hands in front of cityscapes. These images are everywhere, and they tell the visitor nothing specific about the business behind them. Worse, they actively undermine any effort to build personality through copy, because the visuals are sending a completely different signal.

Platform81 in Action

If you’ve looked at any of the pictures on the website, you’ll have noticed that they’ve all got something in common. They show off P81’s team, and they show off Stockport.

A key aspect of Platform81’s personality as a company is that they’re rightfully proud of where they come from. Sleek, glossy pictures with brushed aluminium and frameless glass wouldn’t scream “Stockport.”

Key to this personality-led imagery is making sure that as many pictures as possible had team members front and centre. Or at least loitering in the middle distance. Again, that personality word was front of mind. Friendly and approachable, not smug and aloof. So that meant leapfrog on the bollards, not glossy headshots with cheesy grins.

Once the subject of the imagery had been chosen, it was a case of making sure the pictures themselves lived up to the brand. Natural light and a soft focus looks a world away from glossy and corporate anyway, but after a filter with P81’s brand colours was overlaid, the end results looked urban, gritty and 100% Stockport.

Giving a Website a Personality

For the site’s photography and written content, Platform81 had one overarching goal. Represent the personality, skill and passion that’s powered them for the past decade. The people.

Straight away, that meant that they couldn’t just head over to Shutterstock for pictures of standard office scenes, and reel off a load of old guff about being a “one stop solutions shop.” That’s been done before.  If P81 wanted a site with personality, they’d need to make things personal.

How the Two Work Together

Handled separately, good copy and good imagery can each do a reasonable job. Handled together, with a shared sense of personality and purpose, they do something more powerful.

The clearest example of this on the Platform81 website is the meet the team pages. Each bio pairs a photograph with a short written introduction, and the two are genuinely in dialogue with each other. A team member’s expression and the tone of their write-up are saying the same thing. The result is a page that communicates personality far more effectively than either element could alone.

This is worth keeping in mind for any web project. Copy and imagery briefed independently, or produced at different stages with no shared reference point, rarely achieve the same coherence. The visual tone and the written tone need to be developed with each other in mind.

What to Think About Before Your Next Web Project

Most of the decisions that shape how copy and imagery come together need to be made before a single word is written or a single photograph is taken. A few questions worth asking at the outset of any web design project:

• What personality do we want to convey? Define two or three adjectives that genuinely describe your business, then stress-test them against how your team actually behaves with clients. It also helps to define what you are not. Friendly but not unprofessional. Confident but not arrogant.
• Who are we talking to? The tone that works for senior procurement managers in the manufacturing sector will feel completely different to the tone that resonates with independent retailers. Your audience shapes vocabulary, sentence length, and the assumptions you can safely make.
• Do our visuals match our copy? If your written tone is warm and approachable but your photography features cold stock images, the mismatch will register with visitors even if they cannot articulate why. Brief both from the same personality document.
• Are we using real people and real places where we can? Authentic imagery almost always outperforms stock. It does not need to be expensive. A photographer for a day and a clear brief can produce images that tell your story far more effectively than anything from a library.

Put Words and Pictures at the Heart of Your Web Project

A well-designed website that says nothing in particular, or says it in a way that sounds like everyone else, will not do the job you need it to do. Copy and imagery are not the final stage of a web project. They are central to it.

Getting them right means making deliberate decisions early, defining your personality, understanding your audience, and briefing your words and visuals against the same brief. The Platform81 rebrand is a good example of what that looks like in practice. A website where every element, from the team page photography to the service page copy, is pulling in the same direction.

If you are planning a new website or a refresh and want to talk through how we approach copy, design, and imagery as part of the same process, we would love to hear from you.