The other day, I typed the URL of a website for a high-tech company that I wrote a year ago, with the idea of showing it to a potential client. The site’s launch was delayed for various reasons, and by that time I was immersed in other projects. So I had never taken the time to look at it in its public (live) state.
When I finally checked it out, my heart sank. Somebody had awkwardly rewritten the Home page. Other pages were rife with grammatical mistakes and clumsy, extraneous verbiage I’d never seen before.
Actually, this was far from the first time website copy I wrote that was approved by the client had appeared online in sadly altered form. We’ve probably all seen surprisingly stupid mistakes everywhere online, even on the sites of major corporations.
Why and how does this happen? I think there are three key reasons:
Impatience. It takes so long to design and program a sizeable site that companies tend not to want to wait even a few days longer for someone to proofread all the content and then make needed corrections.
Cost-cutting. Websites are so expensive to create that proofreading probably strikes most companies as a dispensable “extra.”
Ignorance. Many people don’t understand the “domino theory” of writing. Careful writers assemble sentences and paragraphs to introduce concepts in a clear and logical way. Eliminate or rewrite as little as one word or one sentence, and the entire structure falls down.
So what can be done to improve this situation?
> Site designers and web producers: Build in time for the writer/content provider to take a careful look at the site before it goes live. Realize that this helps ensure a polished finished product . . . surely worthwhile after all the effort you put into it!
>Writers/content providers: Include in your estimate a line item for site review. Even if you don’t consider yourself a proofreader (as I do not), this is the only way you can try to preserve the approved copy, minus last-minute client add-ons, line-break glitches, inadvertently repeated copy chunks and other website plagues.
>Clients: Please keep your hands off the copy you approved! If something comes up that requires a factual change, ask your writer to make the fix.
© Cathy Curtis 2010
