{"id":32555,"date":"2010-04-07T11:33:38","date_gmt":"2010-04-07T10:33:38","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.corporate-eye.com\/blog\/?p=32555"},"modified":"2010-04-06T11:40:58","modified_gmt":"2010-04-06T10:40:58","slug":"not-the-post-i-meant-to-write","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.corporate-eye.com\/main\/not-the-post-i-meant-to-write\/","title":{"rendered":"This Is Not the Post I Meant to Write"},"content":{"rendered":"<p>I started out to write about the role of print media in employer branding.\u00a0 Then I followed a link to the website of an industry group.\u00a0 Let\u2019s just say the association has something to do with publishing\/communications.<\/p>\n<p><em>There is no content on their home page.<\/em><\/p>\n<p>Let me repeat.\u00a0 No content.<\/p>\n<p>There are links.\u00a0 There is a (rapidly) revolving banner.\u00a0 There is a navigation bar.\u00a0 There are icons.\u00a0 There are images.<\/p>\n<p>But there is no information at all about the organization or its purpose.\u00a0 In fact, there is not a single complete sentence.<\/p>\n<p>My reasons for devoting a post to this?\u00a0 As follows:<\/p>\n<ul>\n<li>This may be an emerging trend that I just haven\u2019t noticed before.\u00a0 Maybe a new approach designed to make the visitor curious. \u00a0If so, it seems like a terrible idea.<\/li>\n<li>This may be an example of no one watching out for the visitor experience.\u00a0 If so, it\u2019s a cautionary tale.<\/li>\n<li>This may be an example of companies participating in an association but not bothering to check up on how they are being represented.\u00a0 If so, it\u2019s another cautionary tale.<\/li>\n<li>This may be an example of web developers driving a website\u2014focusing on gimmicks without understanding the fundamental responsibilities of the site.\u00a0 And that\u2019s one of the most common hazards in online corporate communications, whether development is inhouse or outsourced.<\/li>\n<\/ul>\n<p>The <strong>takeaways<\/strong> for those in charge of corporate sites (careers and otherwise) are fairly obvious.\u00a0 Pay attention, take or assign responsibility, remember the visitor.<\/p>\n<p>But I have to add one more painful point.\u00a0 I went through several pages of the site referred to here, and every one of them contained serious errors in grammar and syntax.\u00a0 Not nit-picky stuff, really obvious mistakes.<\/p>\n<p>A reminder:\u00a0 This site belongs to an organization that represents companies in the communications\/publishing industry.\u00a0 Plus:\u00a0 The organization is located in an English-speaking country, has been around for more than ten years, and claims to represent dozens of companies.<\/p>\n<p>So I really wanted to track down the apparent gap.\u00a0 I followed the \u201csite designed by\u201d footer link and made my way to the portfolio of the web design company.\u00a0 I won\u2019t overcomplicate this story, but I will say that more than a third of the sites shown in their portfolio had the very same sort of language errors.<\/p>\n<p>I\u2019m not sure what to make of all this, except to say . . . it\u2019s easy to lose track of quality in online communications.\u00a0 Tech wizards think they can write and nobody stops them.\u00a0 Approvers <em>look<\/em> at the site but don\u2019t read the words.\u00a0 And tight budgets prioritize fast and flashy development over well-written content.<\/p>\n<p>In some quarters (discount merchandise, extremist propaganda, etc.), marginal website quality might not make much of a difference.\u00a0 But in professional associations and employer branding\u2014there\u2019s just no getting away with badness.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>I started out to write about the role of print media in employer branding.\u00a0 Then I followed a link to the website of an industry group.\u00a0 Let\u2019s just say the association has something to do with publishing\/communications. There is no content on their home page. Let me repeat.\u00a0 No content. There are links.\u00a0 There is [&hellip;]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":10,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_lmt_disableupdate":"","_lmt_disable":"","_genesis_hide_title":false,"_genesis_hide_breadcrumbs":false,"_genesis_hide_singular_image":false,"_genesis_hide_footer_widgets":false,"_genesis_custom_body_class":"","_genesis_custom_post_class":"","_genesis_layout":"","footnotes":""},"categories":[9,25,5951,6147],"tags":[6277,4121,332],"class_list":{"0":"post-32555","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","6":"category-best-practices","7":"category-careers","8":"category-content-cross-site-2","9":"category-featured-careers","10":"tag-quality","11":"tag-web-content","12":"tag-website-design","13":"entry"},"yoast_head":"<!-- This site is optimized with the Yoast SEO plugin v27.0 - https:\/\/yoast.com\/product\/yoast-seo-wordpress\/ -->\n<title>Not the Post I Meant 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