It’s all just words right so if it works in an email or a letter it’ll work on my web site?

No. Take time to read and rewrite the content of your website and if you have the budget, employ a proper copy editor. At least ensure that someone is given responsibility for “sense checking” all of the content that goes on your web site.

It’s great that as web site owners we can easily go back and correct typos or easily change the date of an event. That’s a luxury we don’t have in print. But try to catch sentences that clearly won’t make any sense once they are on the your web site.

It’s all about context. “Dear Sir, please find enclosed” may be fine in a letter or email, but it will look very odd on a web site and it’s likely that the enclosed item you are talking about won’t be there. Processes such as filling in registration forms must be dealt with differently on the web.

Another common culprit is the using phrase, “Please visit our web site for more information” on your web site. Again this probably derives from copy written for print materials, but just copying and pasting that into your web site will send your visitors into an endless loop of frustration.

Dates are so important for context. Whenever you publish any content on your web site please make sure that you include the date that is was first published.

It’s also sometimes useful to included when the article was updated as well.

The minute you publish something on the web, the clock starts ticking and the information starts to go out of date. When we publish to print, there’s not much we can do about that. However, on the web, we can continually refine and correct our content.

When talking about dates there are a couple of best practices you should observe. It’s usually best to write actual dates rather that the period of time that has elapsed since an event.

For example, if you write in “January 2009″ rather than, “one year ago” then the information stays current.

This mistake is most commonly seen in staff biographies on web sites. So avoid saying things like “Jane joined the company 6 months ago and has 2 years experience …”

Instead, write  ”Jane joined the company in June 2009 and qualified as a doctor in 2007…”