Miles and kilometers, meters and yards, Celsius and Fahrenheit, ounces and grams, liters and gallons; don’t we all get lost at times? Your readers will get lost as easily in your article when it contains measurements they don’t understand; and they might never come back. By using tools to convert your measurements you offer the readers a valuable service.
Reading articles, we all stumble over measurements we are not used to. When writing for an international audience, writers should be keenly aware of that. If meters are used, readers used to yards and feet will get lost; if miles are used, those used to the kilometer will struggle to get the measure of things. And recipe buffs that love cooking will have noticed that a teaspoon in the United Kingdom isn't the same as a teaspoon in the United States. And eureka for us all, the nautical mile differs from the mile of the land lubbers.
Readers will rarely take the time to convert all the measurements used in an article to one they understand. They will rather search for one they can understand without putting any work into it. Thus, articles will fall beneath their radar and lose valuable traffic. A little bit of work can fix that. Cooks browsing recipes won’t bother to check of the writer lives in the United States or the United Kingdom. When the recipe has spectacularly failed, they will blame the writer of the article. Negative comments on the blog are the consequence of that.
To keep me out of that fix, I usually convert my measurements. I then put the converted value into brackets. This little bit of added information makes it easy for readers to follow the article without exerting themselves. To do this in a efficient way, I found a website to convert just about anything from the useful to the rather weird. When browsing the sites I list below, there are some really specialized conversions which are completely useless to me, but might be just what you need to complete your articles.
The homepage to head for is called CSGNetwork. On the entry page you’ll find three options to choose from, Calculators and Converters, Award Winning Glossary, and Free Source Code Snippets. Once through to the calculators and converters, you’ll find menu options to take you to the specific theme page (like Everyday Use or Geography Related) which in turn open the menu of offered calculators or converters. Don’t waste time with trying to figure out which theme is the right one for you, if it seems near enough, go for it, as the calculators are multiple listed in any theme page where they make sense.
For those of you who are too lazy to search for the most common converters (I myself always belong to that group of readers), I've put together a little list with the most common measurement converters:
These are just a few of the useful conversions found on the site. If you have more specialized needs, you’ll have to browse the site, but I'm pretty sure you'll find whatever you need.
For those, like me, who always get distracted by the weird and wacky, there is a load of information to be got out of this site, too. I found a Lunar Calendar, an Easter Calculator, Lunar and Sun Eclipse calculators, several Julian and Gregorian Date converters, and many, many more. Go have some fun, and use them.
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