If English weren’t an evolving language, we’d still be satisfying our retail needs at ‘Ye Olde Shoppes’ and referring to our less intelligent peers as ‘unpregnant’. Many factors contribute to the evolution of language, including geography, culture, and technology — but what determines the changes that are deemed acceptable enough for purists to relent?
Adding a blog to your website is a simple and affordable way to strengthen your connection with both current and potential clients, while improving your search engine rankings. However, many business blogs quickly become neglected and abandoned, which leaves a poor impression. So we asked successful bloggers and online marketing experts:
Consumers are going mobile, and fast. If your business isn’t, it could be missing out on potential revenue from the increasing number of consumers using their phones to decide where to direct their spending.
Sex has been used to successfully sell products as early as 1890 when W. Duke & Sons became the leading cigarette brand by including trading cards featuring scantily clad women in their cigarette packs. Many decades of positive reinforcement later, selling with sex has become commonplace, with boundaries being pushed as far as societal morals allow. Evolutionary psychologist Geoffrey Miller even wagers that all of our consumer choices are motivated by our pursuit of primal desire, for procreation or otherwise.
How has selling with sex manifested itself on the Web? Webcopyplus recently spoke with Melody Nieves, blogger and marketing enthusiast behind www.sexidesign.com, a blog dedicated to exploring the role sex plays in marketing, for her take on sexy advertising online.
I’ve witnessed some horrific abuses of grammar and punctuation over the years and it’s about time someone stood up for these poor little words and symbols that can’t stand up for themselves. With that, I give you the first installment in my campaign to end grammar and punctuation abuse.
I’m officially declaring it’s Apostrophe Awareness Month! Never has a tiny dot with a tail endured so much misuse. With your help, we can make a difference in apostrophe abuse by recognizing some of the worst offenders.
Social media empowers consumers to be recognized by marketers as human again, their voices amplified through an expanding array of platforms in the transparent online marketplace. Businesses are learning the value of this increasing amount of unsolicited market data, as well as the power of engaging their customers in conversation. As a result, products and services are being tailored to customers more efficiently, and businesses are able to respond quicker to issues and concerns.
How are these changes affecting web design? In order to fully leverage the benefits of this new relationship between business and consumer, websites must be designed with and for the ‘social Web’, affecting aesthetics, functionality, and the development process itself.
Greetings, good Internet people! I’m Opticon’s sidekick, The Deleter. I specialize in exterminating spelling, punctuation and grammatical errors with a vengeance!
I wasn’t the most popular guy in school, but rest assured all those years spent studying proper language use instead of frivolous things like ‘sports’ and ‘dating’ have really paid off! Now, I’m an esteemed Internet superhero who helps well-meaning folks like you break bad language habits so you can confidently deliver your message to the masses without error or embarrassment.
Over my years of scouring the Internet for traces of technical violations I’ve noticed that some similar sounding words confuse many of you, and I’m here to get rid of this confusion once and for all.
Here’s my list of commonly confused words and their proper, and improper, uses.
