Eliminate Website Profanity
You might be wondering why I decided to include this article under “marketing.” Allow me a paragraph to explain.
The use of profanity on your website looks unprofessional, is unprofessional and can cause readers to abandon your website all together. What I’m saying is that if you want to market yourself, your charity and your mission in the best light (you always should), then you need to eliminate the use of profanity by you and website visitors. I know what you’re thinking, “I can’t control what website visitors post as comments.” Yes, you can.
Every Website Content Management System (CMS) that I’ve ever played with, such as WordPress, Drupal and Joomla offer ways to filter offensive words. And I recommend using a CMS if you’re not 100% confident in knowledge and implementation of various coding languages. Choosing the words to filter however, can be a very hit or miss operation. Using a search engine you can find numerous lists of words to censor and various CMS plugins to help you make sure those words don’t appear on your website.
Professionalism starts with the words you choose.
One list that I really like is Google’s censored word list containing more than 400 words. I use modified versions of this list on a few websites that I’ve designed CMS themes for, including the SKIP website. On these websites I use plugins such as the WP Content Filter (for WordPress) to disguise profanity used by website visitors and article authors. Download the comma-separated list: Censored.txt or Censored.csv
Here’s what the plugin does for a few swear words from the list.
- s***
- f***
- a******
- b****
No matter how great you think your list is, it’s important to read each and every comment a user posts to your website as soon as possible. If you find a word that was missed by your filter, add it to the list and if necessary, edit the comment to remove or disguise the word. That’s one easy way to keep your website looking professional and inviting for visitors of all ages.