Who should you hire first, Copywriter or Designer? A website copywriters perspective

Who should you hire first, a Copywriter or a Designer? A website copywriter's perspective

Who should you hire first, a Copywriter or a Designer? A website copywriter's perspective. You might have not even known what a copywriter was prior to searching this. As a copywriter for brands, I get asked this a lot. I also get clients asking if I can design their website as well.

Brand owners and even designers themselves think the visual identity is what’s most important. That it’s the foundation of tier branding and should be the number 1 priority. So I’ll give you a very interesting story about a time a website client of mine hired the designer before me as their copywriter. Spoiler alert! It was expensive.

In the end, you can form your own opinion.

The owner of a sauce brand found me in the midst of having her brand and brand guidelines developed by a designer. This wasn’t the most foreign situation for me, and I saw no red flags up front, so I was honored to be chosen to be trusted with her brand.

We went through the initial Discovery call, the Onboarding questionnaire, and the Kick-Off Call. This project has been running smoothly with no hiccups or, so I thought.

I turned in their first draft copy, and when I received feedback, you would've thought I had no idea how to do my job. This person began to explain the layout of their website design, and it would be impossible for my copy to pair well with their visual design plans.

Before I touched any of the feedback I demanded (nicely) a meeting alongside the designer. I unfortunately didn’t do my due diligence to ask for at-least a draft of the website layout. I was so caught up in the honor of being chosen, I didn’t make sure I crossed all of my T’s.

After a 90 minute call, we all reworked the website copy to pair with their design plans, and I was able to properly start their first draft revisions.

What went wrong here?

To effectively communicate how you’d like your visual design to be, you need a brand strategy and website copy.

Brand strategy and messaging ~ guide your designer on how your target audience experiences your brand, how it should look if it is in retail vs. DTC, and what is visually pleasing to that audience.

Your designer cannot be led by vibes. If you run into an issue where your copy doesn’t align with your website layout or design, literally and message wise, you likely hired your creative team in the wrong order.

I swear I am not being biased, but a designer should come right behind your copywriter, or even better, they work together.

A great copywriter would be willing to partner with a designer for the best possible outcome for their client.

Get ahead of this now and hire a copywriter who thinks about these things.

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