Do you write-off poor spellers?

March 12, 2010 in for Churches, Outreach

I stumbled across the Christian Youth Web website today, and caught a glimpse of the header. Does anything stand out to you?

It’s hard to see how you could have this banner at the top of the website, and not notice that you had mis-spelled the very name of your website.

But it happens all the time.

Here’s another example I recently came across on the Daily Bloggr website. This banner was on every page of their site:

It’s good to see they’ve fixed this up now.

A third and final example.

PageBoss is a service to analyse (Australian spelling!) data relating to your blog or website. Here’s how they explain their service:

“pageboss.com is a basic service to analyse websites for website and blog owners. With pageboss.com websites and blogs are able to access to a variety of their statistical data.

Blog and website owners are suppose to analyse their studies regularly in order to improve thier projects. The process of analysis, which is a requirement to succeed in interactive projects, could cause time and performance losses, if it would be made manually by the owners of blogs and websites.”

There’s at least three spelling and grammatical errors in the second paragraph alone!

What impact does bad spelling and grammar have on you? I begin to doubt the credibility of a website when I come across glaring spelling and grammatical errors.

Do you?

Even if just a few people doubt the credibility of your church based on spelling errors on its website, this would be a real shame as it’s so easily fixed. So go on, do a review of your website and tidy up the spelling and grammar!

  • http://youth.stmatts.org.au CJ

    I’m totally with you on this one Steve. Ironically, did you realise that your Tweet last night about the YouTube fail had a spelling mistake in it? :P

  • Steven Kryger

    The irony certainly wasn’t lost on me CJ – I noticed when someone retweeted it this morning! That’s the problem with writing about this – I’ve become my own worst enemy!

  • Ian Carmichael

    “I begin the doubt the credibility of a website when I come across glaring spelling and grammatical errors.”

    Spot the mistake in your own sentence!

    Must have been deliberate.

    Now please don’t go looking for mistakes on our website as retaliation. Please.

  • Steven Kryger

    You spotted it Ian, good work! No retaliation necessary :)

  • http://kirribillikim.blogspot.com KIM

    YES, is the short answer. And I’m afraid you’ve just set yourself up for this, but at least in American English it should be “write off” (a phrasal verb needing no hyphen) — “write-off” is a noun. Or was that sarcasm I missed??

  • http://www.gontroppo.blogspot.com David McKay

    Poor spelling is one of my pet peeves.
    It does undermine credibility for me, as in the book with the title “The Prophesies of Nostradamus.”

  • http://duncanrobinson.net Duncan Robinson

    Hey Steve,

    I am totally with you on the spelling errors, but to be honest we had a short timeline to launch our new website. The problem was with the huge amount of content we needed to get up in such a short time, so grammar and spelling errors slipped through the cracks.

    So we got it up, then cleaned it up, not the ideal way of doing it, but all the emails telling us our spelling mistakes from people in our congregation was really helpful for cleaning it up.