Spell Check Your Website

Why Spell Check Your Website?

On a site with gorgeous design and layout, how important can a couple of typos be? Very important! In a 2002 study, Stanford University teamed with Makovsky & Company to determine what increases and undermines website credibility. The quality of the spelling was among the factors they examined. They found that:

"It's clear from the data that Web users do not overlook simple cosmetic mistakes, such as spelling or grammatical errors. In fact, the findings suggested that typographical errors have roughly the same negative impact on a Web site's credibility as a company's legal or financial troubles."

Especially as the amount of content increases and holds an ever-greater importance on websites that may have other functions, such as business, the expectations for prose on the web may move more towards those in place for printed prose.

How to Spell Check Your Website

There are a number of approaches to checking the spelling of writing that appears on your website.

• First, you can compose the content in a plaintext application that includes a spell checker, taking care of this detail before the writing reaches the web. For example, if you were to compose content in NotePad or a similar app on a Windows or Vista computer or in TextEdit or a similar app on a Mac, you could use their spell checking facilities. It is, however, important to make sure that you have set the preferences as you wish and to keep an eye on any automatic changes that are made to ensure that words that are not within the program's repertoire do not get changed to a word that is in its repertoire but doesn't fit the context. If content is submitted by freelancers, you can paste it into one of these programs to spell check it prior to posting.

• Second, some applications made for web design include a spell check program. This is true of Adobe Dreamweaver, for example, which has a 'Check Spelling' feature.

• Third, blogging software, which some webmasters use to create site content, include a spell check. This is true of Blogger, for example. Look for the symbol that says "ABC" and has a checkmark √.

• Fourth, once the material is online, you can use your browser. Alejandro U. Avarez, for example, explains how to use Javascript in Firefox to spellcheck online material in his blog (see sources for URL), including instructions for spellchecking in other languages.

• Fifth, proprietary software is also available for checking websites. An example is TextTrust, which offers and express and pro version of its checking tool. This is useful when a site is updated frequently, meaning that even if it was error-free at one time, errors can be introduced. A tool like this makes it easier to recheck after editing or adding content: rather than handling each piece of text, the entire site is reviewed. In addition, with TextTrust, professional human editors review the spell check, adding expertise to the tool's automated functionality.

• Sixth, according to Matt Cutts, a UNIX webhost can provide a range of spell checking apps, including Ispell, which has a GNU license. International Ispell, which Cutts does not mention, supports checking of a number of European languages, and Aspell, which he also does not mention, is said to do better at making suggestions for misspellings than Ispell.

Source

"Stanford-Makovsky Web Credibility Study 2002" Stanford University: captology.stanford.edu

"Use Firefox to spell check your website" Urbano's Blog: urbanoalvarez.es

texttrust.com

"SEO Advice: Spell-check your web site" Matt Cutts: Gadgets, Google, and SEO: mattcutts.com/blog/seo-advice-spell-check-your-web-site

gnu.org

lasr.cs.ucla.edu

aspell.net