If you have not heard by now, President Barack Obama recently made a controversial statement on the Tonight Show with Jay Leno. He mentioned that he has been practicing bowling but said that he is not very good yet. He compared his bowling to “Like the Special Olympics.” If you watched it you could almost hear millions of Americans groan in unison.
While most agree that it was an unfortunate choice of words that were not meant the way they sounded, it has created a backlash effect. The White House has issued an official statement apologizing for the statement and stating that it was not intended to offend anyone. Of course the whole country seems to be talking about it. It remains to be seen if the Special Olympics or any other groups will pursue the issue further.
People are misinterpreted all the time and as a website owner how do you keep it from happening to you? After all, misinterpreted content on your site can have negative effects as well. You could loose customers, those customers could tell others, etc. Before you know it you could have a mess on your hands.
Here are a few things to keep in mind to avoid misinterpretations.
- Check yourself. After you write any content for your site look it over for yourself to see if it makes sense and is clear.
- Do not over analyze. Do not go over your content to the point where you drive yourself crazy. If looking it over a few times does not produce anything that stands out chances are there is nothing to worry about. Besides if you are a business owner you probably have more things to do than you have time for and should not neglect other duties.
- Get other people to check your content. Just like you looked over you content a few times have some other people look it over and see if it makes sense to them. You do not have to get hundreds of people to look it over, three or so people should be more than enough. If they give the thumbs up then you are good to go.
The President was on live television but fortunately you have the chance to review your site content before it goes live. Take the opportunity to avoid any embarrassing mistakes.
Comments for all Websites
Friday, September 25th, 2009Google has just released a plug-in for the FireFox and Internet Explorer browsers called SideWiki. For those of you that are not familiar with the term wiki, it refers to a system in which a community creates the content and comments etc. An example of a Wiki would be Wikipedia.
Anyway, back to the original point, SideWiki allows anyone with the plug-in to make comments about any site that they visit. These comments would then be visible to anyone else who visits the site with the SideWiki plug-in installed.
Some are saying that this is a great idea others are not so sure. If you are one of the ones thinking its not a good idea. You may be saying “If I wanted visitors to leave comments I would have made a forum or blog etc.”
The commenting may be out of your control but think of the positive. It could give you insight into your site and how to improve it. Download the plug-in yourself so you can see the comments. If you are getting negative comments about a certain area or feature of your site you can work to change that area to make it more appealing. They may even leave comments relating to how it can be better.
The other side of the coin is that you can see what areas of the website people are leaving positive comments about. So you could turn it into a positive in which it could act as free user testing if enough people are commenting.
Tags: comments, google, plug-in, SideWiki
Posted in Business, Web Design and Development, web content | No Comments »