Just an excuse for a photo of Stephen Fry...

Looking for an unusual Christmas gift? Or just fancy a bit of festive do-gooding? Then take a look at www.adoptaword.com, a fantastic initiative from children’s charity I CAN.

You can adopt a word for a year for £15, and every penny that’s raised goes towards I CAN’s work helping children with communication difficulties.

Very appropriately, Stephen Fry adopted the word ‘Wordy’. We chose ‘crumpet’, which we eat a lot of here at Wordsworks Towers. What word will you pick?

Great explanation of the difference between compliment/complement and complimentary/complementary on the Oxford Dictionaries website – I for one stand corrected on my use of complementary to mean ‘free of charge’.

Incidentally, the OD website is a fantastically useful resource for vocabulary and grammar tips and advice.

Exciting news at The Studio, with a new member of staff - and a bit of publicity to boot.

With another mouth to feed, of course, it means we need more copywriting work! So if you have any brochures or reports that need copywriting or editing,  blog posts to write, flyers or leaflets to produce, scripts or speeches to prepare, webpages to fill, or…well, you get the picture.

Just drop us a line for a quick no-obligation quote.

No, this isn’t a post about a poor taste 70s sitcom, but rather a watch out for website URLs which may do you more harm than good!

You’ve spent time and money, toil and trouble on your new website and catchy URL, of which you are justifiably proud. But before you publish, take a minute to just check that your URL (website address) won’t inadvertently bring a whole different type of customer to your site.

Aside from choosing a unique name for your URL (hard enough considering there are over one hundred million already registered), it needs to be snappy and memorable.

But what looks snappy and memorable to you, immersed in your site and in your project, might not look quite so enticing to someone else in the cold light of day. If you’re going international the risks can be even greater, as a nice snappy URL in English might mean something completely different in a foreign language.

Andy Geldman, a self-employed computer programmer, has a whole website (well, Facebook group) and book devoted to ‘slurls’ – domain names innocently chosen by serious businesses but with amusing consequences.

Here’s a taster (these websites have now been re-named as we presume the faux pas was brought to their attention):

www.scentofart.com – design service offering everything from web design to custom car paint

www.arsecommerce.com – ARS e-commerce is an internet marketing agency with offices in 3 US states.

www.ipanywhere.com – a software service for accessing your computer remotely

So, think carefully for your next website or you could be in the next edition of Geldman’s book.

The New Year has got off to a good start with another client win from the legal services sector.

We’re working with barristers’ set Henderson Chambers to write a new suite of practice brochures. We were recommended to Hendersons by London design agency Soukias Jones Design, who we’ve worked with on a number of previous professional services  projects, including work for Baker & McKenzie, Ince & Co and JP Morgan.

They obviously like what we do – and so do Hendersons. So thanks again guys!

photo credit: Steve Punter