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Your Website Copy Could be Letting You Down! |
by:
John Sheridan |
A professionally presented business website ispowerful and essential marketing tool: it'sfirst thing prospective customers will look at before they decide to contact you. Ifcopy on your website is not written toacceptable standard, it may be losing you customers. It’s not enough just to have amazing graphics and imagery: you needwords to make it complete. Isspelling correct? Are punctuation marks in place? Doescopy make sense? These are questions that website designers should be asking themselves before they uploadnew site.
One ofbiggest flaws with website copy is inconsistency: for exampleword ‘website’. Some sites spell it as one word, some as two words; as far as I am aware both are acceptable, but not both versions onsame site! In my opinion,lack of consistency will detersignificant amount of would-be customers from usingservices ofcompany that has not takentrouble to proofread their website.
Poor spelling onwebsite is another costly but avoidable mistake.
The majority of visitors will leavesite very quickly if they find too many spelling errors. This again will give themimpression thatsite owners don’t really care; and they would be right! I am also convinced that copy that has been ‘padded out’ with insignificant trivia is alsobig turn-off for visitors – clear, concise and informative isorder ofday.
Anything containing textual content should asmatter of course be proofread: it's important that not only are mistakes in spelling, punctuation and grammar found and corrected, but thattext flows smoothly forreader. The copy onwebsite should not be treated as'poor relation' ofproject. You can havemost up-to-date, eye-catching graphics available but you will still need well-written copy to compliment them.
There areodd few web design companies around that will happily inform visitors how they can supply them withstate-of-the-art website but then insert second-rate copy, which totally negates any good work they have achieved. This will reduceinitial impact ofsite, and more often than not will haveadverse effect on business.
It pays to havecopy checked professionally, whetherdesign company has written it themselves or had it supplied byclient; it may costlot less than you think to havewebsite proofread - it could cost you considerably more if you do not!
Remember: if visitors to your site cannot findinformation they are looking for because of badly written copy they will simply leavesite. The only people to benefit will be your competitors.
Aboutauthor:
John Sheridan isprofessional proofreader of hard copy items and website copy. He also writes web copy and occasionally accepts small copy-editing assignments. He can be contacted at: john@textcorrect.co.uk website: www.textcorrect.co.uk
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