In 1970, Citibank set in motion a series of events that eventually gave birth to a movement dedicated to simple, clear writing. Now called the plain language movement, Citibank’s efforts resulted in legislatures across the country passing laws requiring documents like insurance policies and consumer contracts to be written simply.

As website content writers and strategists, we’ve been involved in many projects that go like this: An information architecture (the organization or structure of the site) has already been developed, wireframes created, page layouts designed, colors chosen, photos taken and “lorem ipsum” (industry standard “dummy” text) placed throughout. And that’s when we get a call. Our assignment is to write the copy (the text on the page), which will be “flowed in” just before the site goes live.

While this is an incredibly common way to build websites, it’s not the most effective. As Jeffrey Zeldman, author of Designing with Web Standards, once said, “Design in the absence of content is not design, it’s decoration.” However Zeldman also said, “‘Content’ doesn’t mean ‘having all the copy.’ It means knowing what the site is about, what kinds of information it will present; it also means knowing something about the intended users and what they might want to be able to do on such a website.”