When, if Ever, Will Web Visitors Forgive Poor Grammar?

Last Saturday, afternoon, I took a ride over to a small town called Pacific. Pacific is located south of San Francisco and has wonderful beaches and a first hand view of the Pacific Ocean.

As I sat there watching the oceans pound against the sea wall, eating my bowl of clam chowder, I over heard a man, who was a web designer, talking to a couple of his friends. He was talking loud, so I didn’t feel guilty about hearing his conversation.

Usually when this happens to me, I just start writing an article, however, this conversation had to do with the industry that I hold dear to my heart.

As the story goes, the restaurant patron’s client, who was a financial adviser,?had a 20 page web site that he wanted redesigned.

After the web designer took a look at the site, he called his friend and said, “You have a lot of misspelled words and errors in grammar on the site.” He then went on to explain, that people would not take the site serious and would laugh at him.

To make a long story short, the long time friend became angry and now they are no longer speaking.

I started thinking about my own web sites. Were the words spelled correctly? Was the grammar correct?

I became anxious and wanted to get back to my home office to check on the spelling and grammar on my own sites. Because the Oakland Raiders were playing at 6:00 PM, right off of Freeway 880, I decided to take the San Mateo Bridge home.

Of course, once I got home, I realized that I had in deeded, spelled check my articles and it appeared that most of my site content was acceptable.

Then I went over to my travel site of 12 years. And I found exactly what the gentleman in the restaurant was talking about. There were dozens of articles that were written for and by International Travelers. There were misspelled words and terrible errors in grammar.

I then remembered why this was. When you add the articles of guest writers from article directory sites, you are not suppose to change the content . You are also required to leave the links in place on each of the articles.

I wondered if it was a good idea for me leave these articles on the site? These International Travelers obviously had learned English as a second language.

The decision that the site was a better site, because people were able to express themselves freely, came after I tried to change the wording and correct the spelling on a couple of the articles. The articles were not the same. They had lost some of their excitement and innocence.

I decided to accept the articles and the travel stories as they are. I accept the people who wrote these articles and appreciated the fact that they made an effort to communicate with me and thousands of others, in English.

After all, you won’t find any of my travel articles written in French, German, Chinese, Spanish or any other foreign language!