Whether big or small, all companies and brands should refer to themselves in a consistent way, and that includes the way it’s capitalised and stylised.
Some companies have been known to break grammatical rules to do this. Waterstones was not the first company to take the possessive apostrophe out of its name, but being a book retailer, it attracted particular controversy when it did so in 2012. Meanwhile, brands like eBay and iPhone dispense with the convention of starting a brand name with a capital letter, with eBay even refusing to start a sentence with a capital letter if it begins with “eBay”.
Such rule breaking may be justified in some cases. Some apostrophe-omitting companies argue it helps to streamline their high street and digital presence, since apostrophes can’t be used in URLs or social media handles. There is, however, little excuse for brands writing their names differently as and when they feel like it.
It’s surprising how often we see websites do this at Engage Web. We can be looking at a home page and see a brand or company name written one way, and then a different way on an “about us” page. This can immediately give the impression that a company has poor attention to detail, doesn’t take itself seriously and lacks identity. That’s why we’re always “Engage Web”, and never “EngageWeb” or “Engage-Web”.
Just as galling can be inconsistency between a company referring to itself in the first person (“At Engage Web, we are…”) and the third person (“Engage Web is…”). Usually, websites refer to the company in the first person, but if you choose the third person, remember that a company is singular, not plural. We wrote about this last year.
Conventionally, companies are “we” even if they only consist of one person, although some entrepreneurs who make it clear that they are the face of the company might prefer to use “I”.
There’s no right or wrong way to refer to your brand, so it’s just a case of deciding on your name and sticking with it. This is something we clear up with clients early on in the content development process to ensure no inconsistency from one page of a website to the next. To learn more about our content development and web design services, talk to the friendly team here at Engage Web.
- How to find a circular reference on Excel - May 23, 2024
- Five life skills learned from internet marketing - January 3, 2024
- How artificial intelligence can (and can’t) help you write content - September 29, 2023
