Web copywriting primer?

Hello all,
I help nonprofits create web sites on a shoestring. One place where almost all of them need help is in web writing...not just writing effectively for the web, but writing AT ALL for the web. The process gets bogged down when they have to sit down and decide what they want to say, how they want to say it, what to leave in/leave out, etc. It's often a frustrating exercise for them (I'm not a web copywriter; most of these folks can't afford to hire one)

Has anyone found a good link or two or six on "how do I write my web site" ? I'd love to be able to ease their pain by offering some help...I know that sometimes, all it takes is for someone to articulate a good action plan for writing a web site (or anything else) and it all begins to make sense. I just haven't quite found that. Has anyone else?

Many thanks,
Margaret

For those of you who might find this post through the forums rather than the TechSoup home page, we've created an article around this post that provides a few helpful links regarding writing for the Web:

http://www.techsoup.org/learningcenter/internet/page5392.cfm

Got any other Web-writing tips or links to sites with solid writing advice? Speak up....

Good article, but one aspect of web copywriting was missing, I think. Copywriting for the web has an additional dimension to it if you care to consider it, and that is how it can provide some search engine optimization (SEO) for the site.

I'll try to give a short explanation:

The basic idea (and the most important one) behind SEO is that you want to have on your site the keywords and keyword phrases that people are using the search with so search engines can match your site to what they are using and let them find you.

In normal copywriting and speaking, we don't refer to a thing by it's name over and over, we say this, they, it, that, and so on. The problem is that does are not the words that people use when they search, the use the name, AND they use many variations of the name with different words and word order.

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Your web traffic reports should provide you with confirmation that many things will bring people to your site. Web copywriting requires that to some extent, you need to "inflate" the text so that some of variations of what people use are included. You would never do this with normal copywriting, because it can sound awkward at times and is not needed. Lucky for us people "skim" on the web so this is not noticed unless you do too much of it. Also lucky for us is that many things have different words that mean the same, so you have some variety to work with.

If you do some searches for "web copywriting" or "seo copywriting" I think you will find some more information. I can also provide some more information, but I don't have anything written up at the moment.