Amazing writing?

(Since publishing this article 5D Marketing appears to have gone out of business - which is unsurprising in all honesty!)

Don't talk the talk if you can't walk the walk. And whatever you do, don't try talking the talk if you struggle to construct a coherent sentence. I came across the 5D Marketing homepage the other day. First impressions? It looked slick in all honesty. Nice subtle tones, clear layout, good use of imagery and generally looked the part for a Marketeer's website. So pretty good at first glance. See the screenshot below.

Then I started to read it. Oh dear! 5D Marketing make big claims, the sort of claims that anyone aiming to grow an online business would be interested in. But the way it communicates its offering should set the alarm bells ringing for any potential client.

 

Take a look at the screenshot below:

It's a nightmare in my view. Where to start? We could talk about redundancy - 'the superfluous repetition or overlapping, especially of words' as it's described by our friends over at Dictionary.com- or we could talk about the inconsistent grammar. We might also mention the use of the wrong, perhaps made-up, word entirely (I think they mean 'communicative') and chuckle to ourselves that the page describing 'succinct' was clearly ripped out of 5D's dictionary at some stage. But that might be considered cruel. Let's applaud them for correctly using a possessive apostrophe on 'London's' instead.

 

How about this?

I agree that having the perfect website is a good idea, but to me a 'perfect website' is well written, presents information coherently to potential clients and enhances your business credentials. There's really little point in reaching out to masses of people and appearing sloppy, verbose and, let's face it, incompetent.

 

Or this:

"We will carry a deep analysis..." OK, it's free. But even if it's free how deep will it be? If you can't analyse your own web copy and spot glaring errors like the example above, how are you going to add value to any other business?

 

I mean, really?

Multi-language optimisation is another service that's on offer. They should really work on their consistency with just the single language - English. A missing full stop, followed by an incorrect spelling of 'optimisation.' Doesn't exactly breed confidence now, does it?

 

And whatever you do, don't get me started on this:

It's far from 'amazing writing.' In fact, it's laughable! And do you know what makes it worse? The litany of errors highlighted above all appear on the homepage. Yes, that's right. The company's shopfront, the first thing people see, contains one howler after another. To stretch the shopfront analogy even further, If I was walking down this virtual high street I'd be quickly moving on to one of 5D's competitors once I saw what was on offer in the window.

 

If you can bear it, try taking a look at what lies deeper within the 5D website - no doubt you'll find even more howlers. As far as 5D Marketing is concerned, amazing writing is conspicuous by its absence.

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