Spell-check application reveals major mistakes on Forbes 500 Websites

[2009]

Spellr.us, a web-based application that reviews websites and reports back on spelling mistakes, has detected numerous errors on the websites of some of the largest corporations in the United States.

Microsoft.com, for example, uses the word “seperated.” Dow.com is proud and “commited” to supporting charity organizations. Cardinal Health, a company worth 97.3 billion dollars, invites customers to choose a product “catagory” on one of the website’s main pages. As a result, the error occurs 294 times (see above).

In a twist of irony, 23% of the companies surveyed misspelled the word “success,” and 25% of companies spelled “administrative” incorrectly in the Forbes 500 Online Content Survey.

“It’s very important that organisations don't introduce credibility issues by having problems with their content,” says Kevin Garber, Founder & CEO of spellr.us and parent company Melon Media, based in Sydney. “High quality brands in particular have an expectation projected onto them of consistency and perfection.”

According to a web credibility study published by Stanford University, typographical errors have roughly the same negative impact on a website's credibility as a company's legal or financial troubles.

“Web users form first impressions of web pages in as little as 50 milliseconds—that’s 1/20th of a second,” says researcher Dr. Gitte Lindgaard.  He calls the speed at which web users form judgments about a webpage “the halo effect." This emotional first impression excludes any well-informed thought, but it carries over to cognitive judgments of a website’s other characteristics—such as usability and credibility. If a spelling error is immediately noticeable, chances are that the user will have little faith in the product or service the company represents—no matter how superior it is.

But spell-checking websites isn’t as easy as you’d think. “With larger companies in particular, their sites tend to be very large and have many content contributors.  These factors can make the sites particularly susceptible to spelling errors and typos,” says Garber.

Scanning websites using spellr.us provides the user with easy to understand reports, with errors graded into three catagories: likely, possible and unlikely. Likely words include obvious spelling mistakes or typos, such as “liek” or recieve.” Possible errors include words such as “pricings,” which aren’t technically real words but are commonly used. Unlikely errors are words in foreign languages (for international sites), abbreviations (DHL, for example) and jargon such as “biotherapeutics.”

Suggestions of correctly spelled words are also provided, along with screenshots of the error in question. A user can scan anywhere from 1 to 10,000 pages of a site, scan multiple languages, set a scanning schedule as frequently as every 15 minutes and even create custom dictionaries, so that industry-specific jargon, abbreviations and other words not recognized by the spellr.us dictionary won’t be marked as incorrect.

The seven pre-compiled dictionaries provided by spellr.us include words which are not technically Oxford but are still used in everyday speech. Selecting one of these dictionaries prior to a scan filters out over 8,500 names, 4,200 places, 17 common words such as NSW, and 1,700 tech-jargon words such as ebay and iPod. The other three dictionaries are optional, and include a medical dictionary, lorem-ipsum (text used to demonstrate the graphic elements of a document) and a 2,000 word slang dictionary, including words such as arvo and boozer.

Broken links and images can also be checked for in a scan, and the user has the option of ignoring certain groups of words, such as those in all capital letters, words within quotes, or any word that starts with a capital letter. The application also has a content filter, whereby you can specify certain content to be ignored, such as blog comments (where spelling mistakes are common).

2 Mistakes a Day, a blog that tracks spelling errors on corporate websites, has recently been targeting Forbes 500 websites. Using the spellr.us tool, the blog has disclosed spelling errors on the websites of FedEx, Sunoco and Verizon.

All of the Forbes 500 companies with detected errors have been contacted, with little responses thus far.