Website Content Management Systems – Blessing or Curse?

It’s true, website Content Management Systems (CMS) such as WordPress, Joomla and Drupal certainly make it easier for small business people to edit their content and make changes on their site. But is it a little too easy?

When working directly on websites, I have enjoyed the ease of changing copy, hyperlinks and tags inside WordPress. But I am extremely careful when editing in “the back end”, as there is more of a tendency to make small errors here. And that’s for me, a professional who writes and edits nearly every day (hey, I have the weekends off!)

Small business professionals - just because you can, does it mean you should?  I apply this philosophy to lots of things that I’m not so great at; I could do my own taxes, for instance, but does that mean I should? Should I muddy my brain with tax law?  After all, that’s why we have accountants.

Similarly, you’re great at what you do. But if you edit your own website copy, are you simultaneously making it hard for the non-industry-savvy customer to understand?

It’s not easy to write simply. One example I have is of a client of mine who knows her stuff in marketing. However well-intentioned, adding a 44-word sentence to her web copy with a Flesch Reading Ease of 14 (i.e. hard to read) is a bad idea, particularly considering her target market is local small businesses.

Gauge your content’s ease of reading with the Microsoft Word Grammar Checker. The readability statistics – showing you the reading ease and grade level – will come up as you finish. Also check for too many Passive voice sentences (if above 30%, I would suggest rewrite in a more active structure).

Common Mistakes in Australian Website Content

Besides long sentences with too many conjunctions, another curse is the American spell-checker. How well do you know your Australian Oxford Dictionary?  Do you assume that the spell-checker inside WordPress and Microsoft Word is right? Most of the time it draws from American spelling. MS Word will continually change my ‘recognised’ to ‘recognized’, as if I don’t know my own mind!  If you are selling jewellery to Australians only, you would be wise to use the Australian spelling ‘jewellery’ mainly, and the American ‘jewelry’ in some of the meta tags.

Other common errors, where sometimes people use the wrong word, include:

• your, instead of you’re  (correct: you’re going to the picnic)
• who, instead of whom (this is a tricky rule, forty men, all of whom doth hats, cannot explain it. So if possible, change the sentence to a more active tense)
• there instead of their – or vice versa  (correct: theirs cost more than ours / there was a fiasco)
• now, instead of know (correct: I know my stuff)

All of these mistakes will not be picked up by the spell checker inside of your CMS.

Another point is, when writing the Meta Titles and Descriptions – which will often be seen by Googlers – it’s all too easy to make a typo and jeopardise your credibility (e.g. ‘experts in superanuation’). So use the meta titles that your copy editor has given you, or if changing them, run it by the Australian Oxford dictionary.

Quick tip: Wikipedia defines the meanings and the main spellings of a huge amount of words, so it’s a good online resource.

 

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