If you have an assignment of writing an essay (for example in a school) as a (future) web developer or designer, you may be wondering why would you write essays, and what use would this assignment be at all.
Writing essays improves you as a web designer or developer, because by writing essays you will improve various copywriting and marketing skills, which in turn allow you to create websites and landing pages that convert better.
Website design is creating marketing materials
When you design a website or a landing page, you would want to optimize it for conversions. When a visitor searches for a solution for their problem, and discovers a product or a service, one of the first things they see is a landing page. The landing page needs to give a visitor a reason why use a product or service over their competitors, or even not using anything at all.
In the example of a landing page above (yes, this is our landing page), there is a headline in the hero section that says “Serve your website in minutes, not hours”, accompanied by the text that says “Ferron is a fast web server with automatic TLS certificate management, easy configuration, and rock-solid security — so you can go live in minutes”. The text in the hero section says about benefits of using Ferron - being able to quickly set up websites.
A landing page also often has a call to action, which can lead visitors into an action (like signing up for a service or buying a product). You would also want the call to action to stand out, as this leads visitors to an action, like what the landing page is intended for.
The “The problem with popular web servers” section shows the problems in the existing popular web servers, like complex configurations (from the text below the headline, Ferron seems to be easy to configure), security concerns (the text below the headline says that Ferron has “rock-solid security”), and performance bottlenecks (the sections further down the page can show the performance benchmark results for Ferron).
Also, landing pages often have social proof (like testimonials) to indicate that people are trusting the product or the service that would be sold through the landing page.
Overall, designing a website or a landing page can be seen as creating marketing materials, because landing pages convince visitors, often to buy a product or a service, exactly like what marketing materials would do.
Websites need marketing, promotion and discoverability
If you have a newly set up website, your website might not have any visitors, because no one is even aware of your website. For visitors to come, your website needs to be discoverable. For a website to be discoverable, you will then need promotion and marketing for your website.
There are many ways people discover websites, like organic search, organic social, paid advertisements, or referral. In many of them, you will need a promotional message, like on a search engine result on organic search, social media posts on organic social, or in the advertisements.
For example, when you would like to get visitors through organic search, some of thing you will need to do is: “earning” backlinks (which is off-page SEO; it can be through backlink outreach, you can write emails for this), writing meta descriptions, or optimizing blog post content for a specific search query (both of which are on-page SEO).
We would like to list examples of unknown websites, which are unknown due to poor or no marketing or promotion, but we do not know specific examples, because we’re not even aware of these websites. There are countless unknown websites though - website owners set up websites for private use only or they set up websites and forget about promotion, marketing and discoverability.
Writing essays improves marketing skills
Writing essays can improve marketing skills (which can be used to create better websites and landing pages) in many ways.
According to a blog post on PRLabs about writing skills for marketing students, strong academic writing (such as essays) can improve the ability to analyze trends, interpret data, and persuasion skills, which translate into marketing tasks in the real world.
You can read about more reasons why writing essays can improve marketing skills in the blog post on Attention Insight on how writing essays can help in content marketing.
Conclusion
Writing essays can improve on website design skills, because website design can involve writing marketing messages, and writing essays improves marketing message writing skills. Websites also need marketing, promotion, and discoverability for them to have visitors; writing essays can also help in that - in an example of organic search, it can help you in backlink outreach and on-page SEO.