Some Additional Thoughts on Proofreading
We are often asked if proofreading is really necessary, especially by prospective customers who are creating websites with a lot of written content and facing an expense that they would love to do without. You may be surprised that our answer is, “it depends.”
It depends on the writing skills that you or your writers bring to the table, the expectations of your customers, and your budget. You need to ask yourself three questions. How many misspellings, grammatical errors, incorrectly used words, and improper punctuation marks am I likely to have on each web page? Will my customers notice the mistakes? And if they do, will they care?
If you decide that well-written, nearly flawless web content is necessary for your website, we suggest that you consider hiring a professional proofreader.
To further illustrate our point, please consider the following example:
“We have more repeat customers then any of our competitor’s because we do there job right the first time!”
You might be tempted to rely on Microsoft’s spelling and grammar checker to make sure that the above statement was written correctly. If you did, you would be disappointed to find out that it failed to find three common errors. A professional proofreader, on the other hand, would correctly remove the apostrophe in competitor’s and change then any to than any and there job to their job.
Research has shown that websites with grammatical mistakes, incorrect word usage, and misspellings are thought to be less credible than websites without such shortcomings. Stanford University’s three-year study on website credibility found that even the smallest typographical mistakes adversely affected a website’s credibility.
Granted, it is unlikely that very many of the prospective customers looking at your website will be professional proofreaders or former college English majors, but the odds are very high that each prospective customer looking at your site will remember a few grammatical rules from school. What will that customer think if your web text violates the one or two rules that he or she remembers?
