Be Concise

Be concise

Most business websites have a skewed "waffle to useful content" ratio - especially in the age of AI, which makes it really easy to generate paragraphs of text. This video uses a fictional example from a building company to explain how you can use less words to convey more information and make your site more valuable to its visitors.

The waffle demo

To make the point properly I wrote a deliberately waffly page for a fictional Manchester loft conversion company on the Chobble Template demo site (the text is AI-generated, because that's the stuff I see going up unedited), and then read it out loud in the video. It sounds professional the whole way through and says nothing at all: no prices, no timescales, no guarantees, and no proof of the "adds 15 to 20% to your property value" claim it makes - it could describe any loft conversion company in Manchester. The headings are all generic ("Get started today", "The Manchester advantage"), the gallery has one picture in it, and a lot of it is redundant - the person landing on it searched for loft conversions, so they already know what one is. This is the stuff I see all the time on real sites, and it usually got there one of two ways: copied from somebody else's website, or generated with AI and put up unedited.

Prefer a comprehensive guide on writing effective service pages? Click here to read it (9-minute read).

The concise fix

It'll show you how to replace a wall of AI-generated fluff with a fraction of the words that carry actual information. Every page really has one job: answering why a visitor should choose your business over someone else for that specific product or service, and waffle buries the answer. In the video I compare the waffle page against a concise rewrite of the same page: the description is a fraction of the length, but it fits in the timeline (6 to 8 weeks), the average price (around £30,000), a 15-year insurance-backed guarantee, insulation at 300mm that exceeds building regs by 25%, and lofts converted across North Manchester (Prestwich, Whitefield, Radcliffe, Bury, and Middleton). The features and specifications lists break those specifics out into scannable bits, the gallery gets pictures people actually click on, and all the meta content is filled in - and on the admin side I show what that looks like, because the two versions use the template's PagesCMS editing system very differently: the waffle version is one huge description block with the features, specs, and gallery systems left empty and the meta fields blank, while the concise version fills every field it's got. Fewer words, easier to understand, and much more likely to result in a sale.

It takes 10 minutes to watch, and it's free - no tools to buy, just a way of thinking about the words on your site. To be clear about where I stand on AI text: I think it's useful in the right context, but I wouldn't put anything public-facing up without editing it fully first (there's more on that in my automating things with AI video), and editing is where the business specifics go back in. Every site I build comes with the full source code and no lock-in, so the words stay yours to edit whenever you like. The sites in my examples are mostly static Eleventy sites built the concise way, if you want to see the results.

If you'd like help writing concise, effective website content that converts visitors into customers, drop me a message through the contact form on this page and I'll reply within 48 hours.