Tuesday, 10 August, 2010 14:56
Have you ever visited a website and thought “Man, this site is very nice, well put together, just plain lovely. These guys must know what they’re doing!”…then you start reading the copy and feel like you’ve just had a conversation or sales pitch from an 8 year old?
Misspellings everywhere, wrong use of words, big words that don’t fit the context of the sentence, all of these can turn even the best website, into a second rate offering from a customer standpoint.
If you can’t even get the most basic grammar correct on a website, imagine how it’s going to look on a product, product materials or anything associated with your product. That’s what the customer sees. I have a favorite saying and I use it a lot around fellow workers and clients alike…”The devil is in the details”. The devil truly is in the details. Take the time to read, slowly and carefully, what is presented in front of you. The same goes for spelling and the finer points of website design and layout. Here’s a checklist to go by (a basic one at that):
- Use a spell checker
- Read the web copy yourself…out-loud
- Have someone else in the office read your copy…out-loud
- Don’t try to use overly complicated words just to try and make it sound interesting
- Keep it short and to the point
I normally use FireFox as my browser of choice (just personal preference) and I know it has a built in spell-checker. Make sure you notice when it throws an underlined word at you.
Chances are good it’s misspelled or misused. This comes in quite handy when you use a web-based content editor to manage your website like Joomla or WordPress like we do. Writing copy is something we can do and when we do, we make sure it comes across as intelligent to even our least sophisticated users. Dont’ be impotent when spelling is so important.
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