How the BBC has discouraged me from ever filling in a website feedback form again

I went to the BBC news website this afternoon, to be greeted by this chipper message:

“Wow!” I thought. “The BBC need me to help them keep their finger on the pulse! Of course I have 5 minutes for them. Although I do want to know what the Queen and Jordan (aka Katie Price, not the country) have in common.*” Exactly whose pulse the Beeb are trying to check wasn’t clear, but could it maybe perhaps maybe have anything to do with selling their soul to advertisers? In any case, I emphatically click ‘yes’.

What is the contry of my residence? I click on the UK.

Oh noes! Only international visitors can waste time filling in the survey. Game over. And yet, I still need to click the ‘finish’ button. Where might that take me?

…to another useless screen. My input has been greatly appreciated. Oh that’s nice. Of course it would’ve been nicer to have a link back to the news website which I was trying to visit in the first place, or even – gosh, this is crazytalk mind – to be told that I wasn’t eligible to fill in the survey four screens ago.

*Turns out they’re both considered extremely glamorous, but in very different ways.

Is it Christmas?

I found this today (24 October) in Morrisons. Is it christmas?

David Cameron and the ‘bare knuckle fight’

So David Cameron wants a “bare knuckle fight” with Gordon Brown over the issue of hospitals. Enough of the ridiculous macho verbal foreplay wordplay – why don’t we take politicians literally for once? Brown vs Cameron in a ring – wouldn’t that be hilarious. I think a lot of people would pay a lot of money for ringside seats for that one, and maybe the money could go towards Cameron’s hospital bills. How perfectly apt.

(Disclaimer: I am by no means a GordonBrownaphile, however I do dislike the tories more than I do labour. I don’t condone violence – except when it is consenting, done for money and involves politicians.)

If you’re going to write your own damn copy, at least do it right

Bad web writing hurts your readers’ eyes and your website’s credibility.

A website – nay, the entire internet – is nothing without good solid content. And even counting Youtube and iTunes, the vast majority of the content on the net is written. So why is the copy always at the end of the queue when it comes to building a website?

You can have the most beautifully designed website in the world, complete with the fanciest of applications and gizmos, but if it reads like it’s been written by a sugar-stuffed chimp then wave goodbye to your sales, search rankings and bottom line.

You want me to give you a juicy example, right? Try alteredstatesuk.com. The homepage copy is made up of 86 words. This includes two spelling mistakes, five punctuation errors and 10 faults concerning capital letters. And that’s not even counting some really nasty formatting and sentence formation.

At this point I should say that I’m not trying to kick down a small business out of sheer malicious pleasure. Neither am I touting for business. Yes, of course I could polish it up into sparkling, elegant copy, but that’s not the point. (I do, of course, believe that hiring a good web copywriter is the single most useful thing you can do when you need a website, but I’ll leave that particular topic for another day.)

Maybe you think you’re some webby hotshot and have built your own site. Maybe you’ve already spent all your website money on some fancypants designer. Maybe you’re just cheap. Whatever the reason, if you insist on writing your own damn copy, consider these five tips my gift to you. Together we can make the internet a less painful place.

5 tips for writing good web copy

1. Don’t write as you talk. A friendly, chatty tone is surprisingly difficult to get right. Get it wrong and you sound flippant and sarcastic. But don’t be getting all fancy either. Long words when short ones would do fine make you look arrogant, not clever.

2. Keep it short. Short words, short sentences, short paragraphs. Reading web pages is a lot slower than reading printed pages, so your website visitors will get impatient faster.

3. Give us what we want. This is a pretty big point, but it basically boils down to this: people come to your website for info, not waffle. Don’t write what you want to say, write what they want to read. Don’t know what that is? Well ask them, stupid!

4. Spelling, grammar, punctuation. These three guys are your new best buddies who will instantly make you look a whole lot smarter and more professional. If you’re not sure who they are, then maybe it’s time you were reacquainted.

5. Proofread. Print out what you’ve written, and give it to someone else to check. Don’t do it yourself, as your brain will ignore the mistakes it made the first time round. Don’t let your friend check your copy on a screen, as I guarantee they will miss something. Give them a big red pen so they feel all official too.

So there you have it. You too can be a copywriter. Of course, if you really write like a chimp or you just can’t be bothered, I am (ahem) available for hire…

Access all areas

Nothing makes me seethe with anger quite as much as reading something like this on a website:

“This site is best viewed using Internet Explorer 5 or Netscape 6, or later versions”

If I’m visiting your website, I’m the customer. So why should I have to go out of my way simply to have the dubious pleasure of using your site? Why should I be forced to use a substandard and irritating browser just because you’re too lazy and/or incompetent to make an accessible website? (I use Firefox for most things, by the way – hardly the most radical and unusual of browsers).

Just as bad, if not worse, is how a surprising amount of sites don’t work properly for Mac users. They seem to work fine, but then as soon as I try to do something slightly more complicated – fill in a form, maybe – the site panics and has a breakdown.

Accessibility needs to become more than just a buzzword.

Why designers should get some god damn grammar (aka ‘when signs go bad #4′)

Some of my best friends are graphic designers. Of course, some of what they do is gross, and I wish they would do it in the privacy of their own homes. But I’m glad that we live in tolerant society where they can flaunt their ideas, even though what they do is by no means comparable to real work.

I’m not designaphobic, no siree. I even went to one of those awful ‘design gatherings’ once. Of course I left as soon as I realised where I was, in case I caught ‘design’ and got some unnatural cravings for crayons.

But however wonderfully open minded I am, there is one thing that I cannot accept.

Listen up, designers of the world – you might be the life and soul of the genepool, but this world is not yours, and you are living here thanks to non-designer generosity. So there are some things you must accept and adapt to in order to fit into our neat, grey world. And the first and most important of these is grammar.

Today’s lesson: its.

Its means ‘belonging to it‘. “My dog likes cats. Its favourites are lolcats.”

It’s means ‘it is‘. “Have you seen my cat? Oh, it’s in the dog.”

Now look at the picture below, taken on a street near my house in Newcastle, and notice the mistake. Seriously, I cannot believe that this estate agent board was designed, approved, printed and then plastered around the north of England and nobody noticed the glaring error.

I can (and do) blame the designer who created it, but of course everyone else down the line also has to take responsibility for allowing something so stupid to get through.

How to write a great press release

Three unis, three press releases, one subject. Oh, the power of good writing: two of the universities produced really fascinating, grabby stories – each with a slightly different emphasis – and one was b-o-r-i-n-g.

Here are the three headlines and first paragraphs of each story, and I’ll let you decide for yourself which is the poorer story:

‘Super-fridge’ to help improve lives in developing countries (Imperial College London)
An all-in-one cooker, energy generator and fridge could soon be improving quality of life in developing countries, thanks to an international project launched this week.

Powered by sound – revolutionary stove could help reduce poverty (Nottingham)
It’s a cooker, a fridge and a generator in one – and it could have a huge impact on the lives of people in the world’s poorest communities.

University to develop three-in-one biomass appliance for the third world (Manchester)
The University of Manchester will play a major role in a £2m project that aims to deliver a wood-powered all-in-one generator, cooker and fridge into third world communities in five years.

It’s pretty obvious that Manchester is the dullard here. So what do the above examples teach us about good press release writing?

• Join-up the dots for us. What is a biomass appliance? Don’t know, don’t care. Stoves and fridges, however – now you’re cookin’.
• Make it news-worthy. Why should we care about this fridge-stove thing? Because it could reduce poverty and improve lives. Just being for the third world is not specific enough.
• Make it exciting. Don’t exaggerate, but if it’s genuinely super or revolutionary then say so.
• We don’t care who you are. Nottingham and Imperial concentrate on what has been developed, Manchester emphasise that they had a hand in the development.
• The first words count most. Nottingham and Imperial go straight in, while Manchester takes 18 words to get to the point of the story.

Anyone got any other tips for writing killer press releases?

Example of horrific web copy

I am a total web snob.

I’m not a developer but I know enough about accessibility to seethe at 100% flash sites and splash pages. I’m not a designer but I know a well-designed navigation system when I see one, and I shudder at animated clip art. -Correction- all clip art.

I’m not a web geek but I am a writer, however, and so woe betide those who cross my screen with poor writing.

Content is, after all, what website visitors are after. Very rarely will I go to a website because I’ve heard it does marvellous things with text boxes. I’m much more likely to want to know train times, or find some cool trainers, or get a good recipe for gingerbread, or learn how to build a bat box.

Or buy a tent.

I’m going camping in Italy this summer, and I’ve been shopping for a good tent. In particular a Vango Sigma 300, in case you’re interested. Well I found several shops who sold them, but the cheapest shop was from the most apalling website. (Coincidence I’m sure). This website was ugly ugly ugly, but that’s ok. What I really hated, however, was the web copy.

I’m sure they thought it was friendly, or funny, or light-hearted. I certainly didn’t. I found it extremely irritating and downright offensive in places.

For example, the delivery policy page is a whopping 1,231 words long. And 90% of this is totally unecessary. Here’s the intro:

Our wannabe “Typhoon Tycoon” knows that getting your orders to you on time and in perfect condition is equally as important as “our pile-em-high, flog-em cheap” policy. Stan’s plans for untold wealth and adulation will only come to fruition, if you, our loyal Stan fans & Stanetta freaks, are completely at ease with our shipping methods, which have been painstakingly put together by Del Boy our Delivery Chief (above). Please therefore take the time to plough your way through the boring guff below – it will be worth it!

Then it gets downright stupid:

Del Boy is a bit of a lad and would-be gigolo who loves to impress the girls when he’s out in his van. That means it’s hard to keep him off the road! As a consequence, assuming you placed your order before midnight. and your goods were in stock when you ordered…

and just slightly mysognistic:

For UK deliveries, Del Boy the Delivery Chief respectfully asks you to ensure that someone will be at the delivery address you provide to sign for the parcel between the hours of 8.00am – 5.30pm, Monday to Friday (preferably scantily clad with a garter so he can recognise you – er, that’s for the ladies of course!).

This appalling copy just goes on and on and on.

I wrote them a polite email explaining that their offensive web copy was the reason why I had decided not to give them my custom, but strangely I have yet to receive a reply.

1997 BBC website: UGLY

The BBC is everything you want to be. Smart, wise, occasionally witty, and always, always right.

Should you write headlines in Camel Case? Let’s see what BBC News do… ok they only use caps on the first word of a headline, so that’s what you must do too.

Is it ok to write paragraphs for the web which only consist of one sentence? Just a second, we’ll consult the web writing gospel… yes it’s fine, go ahead.

And it’s not just the writing of course; BBC online is the authority on how to order and represent a huge amount of information in the most easily accessible manner possible; basically what every website in the world aims to do.

The BBC is such an institution on the internet that it’s extremely amusing to stumble across an old BBC website from 1997. It’s like finding a photo of a respected school teacher from when she had a perm, blue eyeshadow and huge shoulder pads.

It’s not even worth me trying to describe the sheer horror of the 97 site, just go and have a look for yourself (then thank your lucky stars that they abandoned animated dropshadow images…)

Using the little grey cells

The CBI is the Confederation of British Industry. Not the most thrilling organisation in the world, you might think. But just you wait til you see their website! It’s a 3-column adventure of words words words words words adverts and navigation.

Should you have the pleasure of trying to get in contact with them, perhaps – and let’s go for a crazily unrealistic scenario here, – perhaps you’re a journalist requesting an opinion about a business-news related story. (As if that would ever happen!)

You’ll be pleased to know that the CBI understands that even the most stressed, deadline-anxious journalist can’t resist a treasurehunt, and so to reach the press office you have to follow the links on three consecutive text-dense pages. What larks!

And who wants a boring email address to a named contact, when you can have an anonymous form with 15 fields and 3 radio buttons?

What delighted me most, however, was that even though I needed Poirot-esque skills to find a way to contact anyone, the CBI was suddenly concerned that I had the web skills of a 1997 PE teacher trying to “surf the cyberweb super highway”. After hitting submit I was faced with the following message:

Thank you for your interest in the CBI. Please click on the navigation bar to select the area of the site you would like to go to next.

Complete Blimmin’ Imbeciles. And in case you’re wondering, no they never replied to my message.

(On a separate note, have you noticed how horrible the CBI logo is? I had to check back to the website that I hadn’t accidentally cut part of it off. The large line on the right just looks like a cursor in mid-flash…)