Gabriel Harper's Blog

I feel inspired to post this blog as a reminder to all those Webmasters who think they can get away with neglecting not only useful and relevant content, but allowing obvious spelling and grammatical errors in some very important places.

Content development and authoring is vital for nearly any Web site. Many Web sites thrive on content alone by providing articles, news, reviews, guides, opinions, and much more. Such content may not be the focus of product and service oriented Web sites, but developing effective copy and authoring content that converts visitors is just as essential. No matter how gorgeous your Web design is, no matter how cool your product may be, and no matter how much traffic you get, bad copy is a major buzzkill.

Some mistakes are commonly overlooked and aren’t necessarily going to cause much harm. For example, forgetting an apostrophe in a possessive phrase. But when I visit some site with a top-notch design, great navigation, and obvious attention to detail in all other respects, it blows my mind to read “This great bussiness product is download here” in their call to action.

Is this being overly harsh to those whom English is a second language? Not at all. If I pull you aside at the bar and insult your broken English, then you can whine. But I’m not here to be nice, I’m here to help you succeed. So get it together folks. If you can’t write in your target language fluently, get some help or hire an author.

This entry was posted on Sunday, November 26th, 2006 at 7:50 am and is filed under SEO. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.