Checking Your Work Sucks
Posted On: 2008-01-03
You know, one of the most boring parts of the work I do is checking the finished product. It really does drive me nuts and I would avoid it like the plague if I could. I always check my writers' work to make sure that it's as close to perfect as we can get it and I sometimes check Steve's work too but when it comes to checking my work ... well that's when I really do want to go to sleep.
For some reason going back over my own work to make sure that there are no mistakes is the most brain-numbing experience I know of. Yet it should be no different to checking my writers' work and Steve's work ... but somehow, when I sit down to proofread what I've done I'd rather be somewhere else and doing just about anything else than looking back over my work.
But that's exactly the time when I really do need to switch on and concentrate because I'm not perfect ... in fact I'm just as fallible as any of my writers and I make just as many mistakes as they do.
Only yesterday I finished the design of a website for a client and turned it over to Steve to add the text. The first thing he did was open it up in his browser and found that my perfect design in Internet Explorer was a total mess in Firefox. I had gone back over my work before I sent it on to Steve but I obviously hadn't taken the time to see how that site rendered in other browsers.
So do you ever bother to check your work? Do you check your galleries or free sites before you submit them or are you like me and just want to get the work out of the way so that you can go on to the next job?
Now if you are like me how many mistakes are you missing and what sort of impact is that having on your bottom line?
This morning a friend of ours pointed us to a website that should have ranked highly in our area for a number of terms related to the business behind the website. Instead of being on page one for any of those terms the site was absolutely nowhere to be seen and anyone searching in any of the major search engines for the services the business offered would never have found the site.
The reason was simple and really very obvious but the designer - a professional designer - had missed completely missed something that was vital to the success of the website. The bit that was missing was the keywords and keyword phrases that related to the business. There wasn't one important keyword or keyword phrase in the text on any of the pages. Not one!
They were on the pages in a graphic but search engine spiders can't read graphics and the graphics didn't have alt tags so the site was never going to rank for anything that was important to that business.
So when was the last time you made a mistake like that? If you're a newbie then accept the fact that you will make mistakes like that ... it's inevitable. So be sure to go back over your work and check it thoroughly. That may be the last thing you want to do because checking your work is definitely not exciting ... but it is vital if you want to succeed.
If you've been in this industry long enough to have graduated beyond the newbie ranks then don't think that you're beyond making mistakes ... because you're not. Everyone makes fundamental mistakes from time to time no matter how much experience you might have and so everyone needs to check their work thoroughly before moving on to the next task.
I know that checking your work is not sexy and it definitely is boring but it's something that you simply have to do. A quick scan of what you've done isn't good enough, you need to go over your work carefully, line by line and almost word by word. You need to check your links, you need to check the referral codes you've added to the links to your sponsors and you need to check that you've included all your keywords and keyword phrases in all the relevant places on your page.
If you don't bother checking your work then you will make mistakes and when you make fundamental mistakes all that time that you've put into the job will be wasted and when time is money you certainly don't want to be wasting your time.