Being a copywriter, one gets some interesting jobs. One of my more recent tasks for an ongoing articles project for Clever Starfish, made me think ‘wow maybe I should consider that’. It was an article about whether or not you need a Frequently Asked Questions page on your website.

Clever Starfish do great things for their own clients and, being busy as hell, have for a while neglected their own materials. As is often the case, it’s your own business that comes last. Lately though, the Starfishies have been building up some momentum on their own informative articles.

Working with this material is exciting stuff, not least because it provides another layer of depth and interest to their own website. Like with many writing projects, once you break the ice on one, you find a wealth of others underneath.

Working with the Starfishies on their articles projects is always simple, good fun. Not to mention educational! I love it when I learn something new when I work with a client.

The way I work with Clever Starfish is I get a rough draft by email, a bit of an overview of what the whys and whos (why it’s being written and who is going to read it), and some information about the business’s goals: like, what they are hoping to achieve.

Because the text is already drafted, it’s often just a matter of cleaning it up, making some suggestions about what could work better (or, sometimes, be left out completely), and sending it back. If my changes create new sparks of inspiration — as they are sometimes wont to do — we might go another round of collaboration. Sometimes we get two articles out of one original draft.

As they say, nothing good is ever created in a vacuum.

So now, after working on that FAQ page article for the Starfishies, I’m thinking that maybe I ought to do one myself…

Tags: collaboration, website articles
Filed under: Projects & Launches