Website Design and Content

Charles Crawford is an accomplished writer and communicator. His style is accurate, lively and above all readable.   

As well as drafting many dozen official speeches, articles and interventions over his FCO career, Charles Crawford produced a large body of vivid telegrams and emails, many in an unconventional direct style. His work has been praised at the highest levels in London and in NATO and the European Union:   

·         “I keep your telegrams to the end of the queue – they are the only ones I want to read”

·         “fabulously readable and interesting analysis, with practical application … just about the best scenesetter [No10 staff] have ever seen” 

·         “one of the few truly original thinkers in my time [in the FCO] – at his best on pungent analysis and stylish, warm-hearted influencing"

·         “acrobatic and eye-catching in his use of language”

Much of this work dealt with issues of significant foreign policy sensitivity and will be available to the general public only in many years’ time under UK Public Records procedures. Now his energetic witty drafting and presentational skills are now at long last available on the open market. 

Charles Crawford takes the line of Frank Luntz in Words that Work: “it’s not what you say – it’s what they hear”.

What people ‘hear’ from a website is to a great extent shaped by what they see and feel, including via subliminal first impressions about layout, punctuation and style. Is the site cluttered, complicated, hard to read at a glance? Is its message clear? Is the site weighed down with too many words written for other formats (eg brochures or press releases) which do not work well on a web-page?

Charles Crawford offers frank and bold suggestions on how websites might quickly be improved in style and substance, to get the content and its messages simple and direct. 

He is happy to discuss informally how this might best work in individual cases. Contact him here: mail@charlescrawford.biz