Website Copywriting for Scotland’s Only Barista Academy

The Project:

The project was to provide website copywriting for  The Scottish Barista Academy, Scotland’s only barista academy. Established in 2013, it is owned and run by Jim Watson. Jim has trained over 6000 people in the last twenty-plus years and is an Accredited SCA and City & Guilds Trainer and oversees all the training courses provided by the Scottish Barista Academy.

The Challenge:

Jim Watson was rebranding and moving the Scottish Barista Academy to new premises and at the same time was building a new website for the business.

He approached me in December 2016 to produce the copywriting for the new website, which included 12 course descriptions for the Barista Academy courses, the Home page copy and About Us page copy.

The Solution:

I recommended the following approach:

• A full review of existing material
• 12 pages of course descriptions copywriting, optimised for the website
• Home page copywriting
• About Us copywriting
• Adapted to the tone of voice of the audience
• Supporting images, researched, sourced and optimised for the website
• 3 revisions of all copywriting (although only one was needed)

I worked closely with Jim to understand his business goals and drivers and find out more about his business. This involved a morning visit to his premises to see where he trained his students and find out a bit more about the process of coffee making. At this point, I was a coffee drinker only and did not realise that there was so much to making a great cup of coffee!

Armed with my new knowledge about coffee, I went home to research the coffee roasting processes, green coffee, the brewing processes, the international certifications available, the coffee industry, as well as the competition and their websites and courses.

For the About Us page, I interviewed Jim about how he got into the coffee business, asked many questions, recorded the interview and delivered the copy a few days later.

The Result:

I produced the web copy for Jim and delivered the first draft of the copy decks to him on schedule. The copy decks were formatted and laid out in the suggested placement for the copy on the web pages, and included suggestions for imagery for the web developer. They required only minor updates and were signed off with one revision only.

Jim was very happy with the new optimised website copy and it has been on the Scottish Barista Academy website for over four years now. He has also returned to me to write product descriptions for his other coffee business website.

You can find out more about my services here.