How to make a website gift for your girlfriend

The line that lands is never "you mean everything to me". It is the badly parked car. The argument about the film neither of you finished. The thing she says when she is tired and thinks nobody is listening.

Detail is the proof that you were paying attention, and attention is the actual gift. Anyone can write that they love someone. Only you can write that she hums when she is concentrating and has no idea she does it.

If a sentence you have written would be true of anyone else, cut it and write the version that could only be about her.

If you would not say a sentence out loud, do not put it on the page. She knows your voice. The moment it starts sounding like a greeting card she will notice, and the whole thing tips from moving to slightly embarrassing.

Slightly awkward and true reads far better than polished and generic. Leave the sentence that came out wrong if it came out honest.

Almost everyone overwrites these. The letter does not need to be long — it needs to contain one thing you have not said properly before.

Put that thing in the middle rather than at the end. People skim to the bottom of a long block, and the middle is where a skimmer slows down.

A gallery of twelve photos says less than four photos with a line each about what was happening. The caption is where the memory actually lives.

Pick the unflattering ones. Curated-for-flattery reads as a slideshow; curated-for-accuracy reads as a relationship.