Check the URL First

Proofreading starts with the URL. Please believe it, or you'll have a disaster on your hands. I cannot tell you how many horror stories I've heard of people having costly documents printed where every inch was carefully proofread, but because the URL doesn't look that familiar, it is glossed over.

Result - thousands of spectacularly printed and varnished brochures, programmes, annual reports etc are printed with an incorrect website address.

I smiled to myself this morning when I found this article in MarketingSherpa and decided that I had to blog it, because I know that no matter how many warnings we sound, people will still forget that proofreading should start with the URL.

Proofreading Starts with the URL - the Pain of Typos

By Anne Holland, Content Director

Admittedly, our B-to-B Marketing Summit Brochure was brochure-from-hell from a proofing standpoint. The marketing department had to get 29 different speakers' names spelled properly (this must be very easy in places, such as Sweden, where you have a limited pool of names to deal with, but in multicultural America you always have to double-check.) And we had to make sure the right headshot went with the right speaker, which can be easier to screw up than you think.

Plus, there were 500+ past attendee company names to spell correctly, including some with caps in the middle (Sherpa included, unfortunately) and some without, which also makes guessing impossible.

And, of course, all those session times ... for some reason putting sessions into the proper slots is also always harder than expected. Like children, they wiggle about and bump into each other instead of lining up in a nice, quiet, orderly fashion.

So, when the marketing team proofed the blue lines the printer sent over for our big August campaign, they had a lot to review.

Which explains how everyone totally forgot to proofread the response URL. So, we ended up with tens of thousands of brochures that read, Go to "http://www.vanityurl.com," which was typed in as a placekeeper copy early in the process and never updated.

When the team alerted me about this, I said, "No problem, just go buy VanityURL.com and redirect from it!" Which would have been lovely except for the fact that NutriSystem already owns it.

Read more.