Proofreading course studentWe encourage our proofreading course students to start a website or a blog, especially if they’re planning to go self employed or do freelance work.

But doing an online proofreading course doesn’t necessarily give you webbuilding skills! It can be hard to know where to start and what to include.

The copy’s content and personality / tone depend on your intended readership. This determines everything.

A site for football fans will need a different approach than a site intended to showcase your work to editors.

You need to establish two things about your site:

  1. What’s it for?
  2. Who’s it for?

The answers to these questions will determine the content, the writing style, the design … everything. So you must be clear about them from the start.

If you base your content on ‘everyone in general’, you usually end up with ‘nobody in particular.’ You must focus everything on your target visitor and their requirements.

When you come to write the copy, remember: people skim copy online, so you must remove anything that will slow them down, like unnecessary punctuation and capital letters. And write naturally … write things as you’d say them.

Our partner organisation, Digital Creative Hub, are here to help you with every step of setting up a new website or blog. They offer CMP students a 20% discount on all of their services, too. Check out their website

See our proofreading courses