Here are three ways you can get good copy for your website.

John Caples was one of the world’s best copywriters. He was an expert in measuring how well an advertisement worked. And I think he said it best in Tested Advertising Methods. He said that, in a print ad:

75% of the Buying Decisions
Are Made at the HEADLINE Alone

There are several important pages on your site: The front page, your product pages, your e-commerce pages (if you do e-commerce). But none of these is as important as the one critical page on your website, your landing page. Your landing page is critical, because it’s the first page a visitor sees when he comes to your site.

If you’re a big company, you may put up a website just to have an online presence. These websites are frequently full of colorful graphics and whizzy animations, are difficult to navigate, and contain almost no useful information. They are the Superbowl ads of the web. Very expensive, seen by millions of people, and do little except get the company’s logo in front of as many eyes as possible. Check out Coca-Cola’s site for an example.

For a high-volume product or service that appeals to a broad market (like Coca-Cola), this strategy makes sense. Everybody knows what Coca-Cola is and what it tastes like. And Coca-Cola drinkers span age groups, regions, and occupations. Anyone could be a Coca-Cola customer. But small businesses—and even medium-size businesses—are different.

This article is about managing a software project. More and more, average people and businesses are managing software projects in the form of customized blogs, websites, and e-commerce shopping carts. Even more so, if they are trying to deploy a custom intranet application, for internal use by their company’s employees, or an extranet application, for use by their customers and corporate partners, they may find themselves faced with developing a fully custom software system.

For example, one project I recently worked on is a custom extranet application that a certain company’s clients use to submit jobs to the company. As each job request goes through the system, a number of people in the company need to add information and sign off on it. This automated system was thick with business rules for this particular company and as a result was almost completely custom, because no off-the-shelf software got even close to doing the job the way they needed it done. It was expensive for them to develop, but it allowed them to automate a process that previously had been manually intensive. (Before this, they would email Excel spreadsheets around. Now, the computer handles all the grunt work, and frequently, all a human has to do is click “Approve.”)

This is an extreme example, but more moderate examples also exist. For example, a Gilmore Girls fansite I put together years ago had custom database features in order to store memorable quotations from the show with fan commentary, linked to episode and topical guides. That’s something that has not to my knowledge been done before or since. It required custom programming and configuration to process user submissions, store the data, and display the data in the right format.

Unfortunately, if you’re facing this type of project, many of the consultants and service providers you talk to will not be aware of the software development issues involved and how to manage the software-development risk. They may try to shoehorn your problem into something off-the-shelf software can accomplish. Or they may just “hack together” custom programming, without managing the complexity of the underlying software design. Or they may want an up-front specification of everything your project needs to do and may want to spend months working out these details, under the guise of good planning. But how can you plan a project you have zero experience with? You can’t. And neither can they.

Now, this is not a problem if all you need is a stock installation of off-the-shelf software. For example, if all you need is a WordPress blog with off-the-shelf plugins and an off-the-shelf theme, the traditional approach is the right one. Figure out what you need, install it, make sure it works, and release it to the world. Even if all you need is a custom theme for a stock website, the traditional graphic design approach—3 mock-ups, choose one, then implement it in code—may be the best approach. Even if you have a semi-custom installation of a more complex web application, like a content management system or an e-commerce shopping cart, the traditional approach may be acceptable.

But the more customization your project requires, the more software engineering concerns will impact it, and the more ignoring these concerns will put your project at risk.

This is especially important in a financial squeeze, where you need to maximize what you get for your software-development dollar and minimize the risk that the project will go off track or bust.