Calls to action for small teams

It comes up on almost every project, usually later than it should. Most advice about calls to action assumes a team that does not exist at your size. Here is the version that does not.

Writing for the web is largely an editing job: the first draft is always longer than it needs to be. It rarely shows up as a line item, which is exactly why it slips.

What to keep

One clear next step beats several options. Small and consistent beats large and occasional here. Doing this properly once is usually cheaper than doing it approximately three times.

What to drop

Process that exists to coordinate ten people is overhead when there are two of you. The teams that handle this well are rarely the ones with the biggest budgets.

How we handle it

Reduce the sense of risk near the button. The cost of getting this wrong is rarely visible on the day it happens. The practical test is whether someone new to the project could tell, in a minute, that it had been handled.

In practice

Pages that answer a real question outlive pages written to fill a slot in a sitemap. Three things worth confirming about calls to action before you move on:

• Someone can say what the current setup is without going to look
• One clear next step beats several options — and you know whether that is true here
• There is a way to tell whether the last change to this helped

If you want a second opinion on how yours is set up, ask.