What to ask your agency about product descriptions

The advice here is unglamorous, which is probably why it gets skipped. If you are briefing an agency or a freelancer on product descriptions, these questions are worth asking early.

Writing for the web is largely an editing job: the first draft is always longer than it needs to be. The practical test is whether someone new to the project could tell, in a minute, that it had been handled.

Questions worth asking

• Who will actually do this work, and have they done it before?
• How will we know afterwards whether it worked?
• What happens if it needs changing in a year?
• What are you assuming that we have not confirmed?

What a good answer sounds like

Lead with the benefit, support with the specification. The teams that handle this well are rarely the ones with the biggest budgets. The teams that stay on top of it are the ones who put it on a calendar rather than a wish list.

Answer the question that stops the purchase. There is a version of this that is over-engineered, and it is worth avoiding. The version that survives contact with a real deadline is the simple one.

In practice

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

• Someone can say what the current setup is without going to look
• Lead with the benefit, support with the specification — and you know whether that is true here
• There is a way to tell whether the last change to this helped

If any of that sounds like a description of your current setup, it is fixable.