Rarely Asked Questions

At Capulet, we write a lot of web copy. We recently finished a job for a Vancouver gaming company whose name I may not be a liberty to disclose (their contract is a bit obtuse). Anyhow, I often have to discourage our clients from the sales-oriented FAQ.

The reality of the frequently asked questions list is that customers rarely ask those questions. Companies would like customers to ask them, but they don’t. I sometimes call these ill-advised pages RAQs.

I was recently on the PRWeb site, and found a great example of a RAQ. In truth, there are some useful questions and answers on that list, but the first one made me laugh:

How long has PRWeb been offering this service?

We began in August 1997, pioneering free online news distribution. The Internet Way Back Machine began cataloging copies of our site in 1998. For a history of PRWeb, you can visit their site and see the different iterations of our service.

Of course, that must be everyone’s first question.