A job ad that ended with the words "Usual rubbish about equal opportunities employer etc" had staff at a Liverpool Hospital trust in hot water this week - and it may have caused a few smiles, but surely also major headaches for those involved.

With the best will in the world, managing content of websites can be an enormous task and human nature often allows errors - in this case clearly 'draft' content - to be published online for the world to see. 

The story about the Broadgreen University Hospital's website was carried by the BBC this week and chimes with the latest chapter in the way Sitemorse can help with website governance.

The Sitemorse ' Engine' can be used to search for 'banned' content, even for  poor spelling, as part of the  production process, providing alerts that can help overworked managers avoid this kind of problem.

The hospital trust has launched an enquiry into how the offending content - which has since been removed - was published and had to put out a lengthy statement around its commitment to equal opportunities.

A BBC story suggests poor spelling is costing the UK millions of pounds in lost revenue for internet businesses.

Quoting online entrepreneur Charles Duncombe, who runs travel, mobile phone and clothing websites, the BBC says an analysis of website figures shows a single spelling mistake can cut online sales in half. Mr Duncombe says when recruiting staff he has been "shocked at the poor quality of written English. Sales figures suggest misspellings put off consumers, who could have concerns about a website's credibility", he says.

Those looking for Return on Investment (ROI) from their web presence can also find spelling errors cost them dearly. When you're hoping for a decent search engine ranking, incorrectly spelt product, brand or company names can't be picked up by the likes of Google - so people who'd like to buy your products can't find them.

Sitemorse helps its clients avoid such pitfalls because our software looks at text as well as code. In addition, Sitemorse's spell-check can be used to solve other issues. Have you ever wondered how many times your company name appears on your site? Maybe you would like to know if all traces of your old office address have been removed. Perhaps a rebranding exercise has you trawling through every page on your site? Search filters from the Spelling module make such tasks easy to achieve. As Sitemorse examines your site it sifts its way through the text. If it finds a word, or phrase, you are filtering for it highlights when and where it made the find, just like any other problem.

We've had a number of support requests raised over the last few weeks about how to add words to a dictionary in the Sitemorse Spell Checker.  Particularly words that need specific capitalisation and also designating words that may or may not appear CAPITALISED.

Looking in more detail we found that we weren't consistently applying rules and that the current interface didn't lend itself to easily detail how words should be added to the dictionary to take account of capitals in odd combinations - in, say, a brand name.

We have addressed both issues and the update has been made live this week.

The big change you will see is when choosing to add words to the dictionary.  When you click the Add button, rather than simply getting a message saying the word has been added to the dictionary, you are taken to the same page as when you click on the actual word.  This screen gives you the detail of where the word occurs on your site but more importantly gives you various options for adding the word to a dictionary.  Take a look at an example of the page

The options are that the words can be in the form of

either:-

• Sentence-case
  • the word can appear in any form e.g. renfrewshire, Renfrewshire, Renfrewshire
• Exact match only 
  • the word is only valid in the specific format we found on the site e.g. SpellChecker

or, a combination of:-

• Lower-case
  • the word can appear entirely in lower case
• Title-case
  • the word can appear with first letter as a Capital
• Upper-case
  • the word can appear entirely in CAPITALS

If we find "versions" of the word in one of your dictionaries we will show which dictionaries it appears in next to that style entry.  So, if we are flagging up the Upper-case and lower-case versions as being in error but the word appears in your custom dictionary in Title-case we will flag this up to you as in the example above.  You can then check the tick-box next to Upper-case or Lower-case if they are permissible as well, or any of the other options that are appropriate.

You can see that the Exact match only option isn't present as there is nothing special about the capitalisation of the word as found on the site and, also, that the Title-case check box is checked and greyed.  It is not possible to uncheck a check box to delete the word from a dictionary (as the word may appear in multiple dictionaries and you may not wish us to delete all occurrances).  If you wanted to remove the Title-case version of the word click on the link to the dictionary it exists in and delete it from the dictionary.

Hopefully, this will address the issues raised with us recently and benefit everyone using the service.

Following the recent announcement from the Local Government Association (LGA), regarding the numerous 'banned' words for Local Government websites - Sitemorse read the content of the LGA's own, public facing website and found that the banned list doesn't seem to be relevant for their own web presence.

A number of the banned words were found when looking at some of their website pages, worse offender being worklessness, which occurred nearly 100 times, other culprits included; spatial, framework, initiative.

As part of our content review module, we are able to quickly read the content of many thousands of web pages, looking for spelling errors, out of date product, organisation or service names, email or web address that are no longer in use, or as in this case read through the content and find words or terms that have been banned from use.

As an example the term 'worklessness' may appear as a page and report title, it might be included in the page metadata, the page headline and the page content!

Sitemorse identified many instances of the banned words, its reports detail each occurrence down to the line in the code, allowing the website manager to quickly and efficiently find the word and make the relevant corrective action.

At no charge, Sitemorse Local Government clients who have the content review / spelling module, can have the banned words list from the LGA included in their regular audits.  Raise a Support Request, by clicking on the Help & Support button on your Dashboard, and ask us to add it to your service.

As part of this months Local Government Website Index, we will summarise the instances of the banned words on LG websites.

Since we launched the SpellChecker feature of Sitemorse we have had requests to "internationalise" it to take account of other languages that our clients  and prospects use.  This was an item brought up in our Annual Customer Survey and, as with most such requests, we have now addressed this requirement

As of yesterday (Wednesday 1st October 2008)  we relaunched the SpellChecker module to greatly increase the number of languages we evaluate.

This initial release includes support for:

• British English ("en-GB")
• American English ("en-US")
• International English ("en")
• Irish ("ga")
• Welsh (both "cy" and "cy-GB")
• French (both "fr" and "fr-FR")
• German (both "de" and "de-DE")
• Spanish (both "es" and "es-ES")
• Dutch ("nl")

To ensure content is evaluated under the correct language Sitemorse fully supports the "lang" attribute of any HTML tag.  When the language codes above are encountered the appropriate dictionary is consulted.   Here's a link to a Knowledge Base article that describes how this is done: Specifying the language of content via the lang attribute: http://www.sitemorse.com/kb.html?kb=1278808428#q1280869146

Sitemorse fully supports ISO-5589-1 and the appropriate HTML entities for displaying words in the above languages.

You can create different Custom dictionaries for each language.  You can configure which of these dictionaries are consulted from the SpellChecker page so you can decide which are appropriate for your various sites.

We'll add other languages as required.

The interface remains the same, at this point, with the exception that the language is reported where applicable.

Many subscriptions include the SpellChecker feature.

The SpellChecker does as it says.  It is, however, different in a few ways from the spell checking capabilities of the tools you use to check your content as you create it.

From a purely content point of view then it acts as a final confirmation that your content is correct as it actually appears on your website.  The main difference is that it will check all "viewable" text that the browser can see.  So it will check all of your tags and Metadata as well as the content.  Incorrectly spelt Metadata wont get too many hits from a search engine.

You can create your own custom.dic, which can even be created by uploading your existing custom.dic from something like Word.  We can add dictionaries from a range of dictionaries we have available.  And will also try and locate industry specific dictionaries on request.  And selecting which dictionaries to use during testing is a simple configuration option of selecting tick boxes.

If we highlight words that are, in fact, correct then adding words is simply a matter of clicking on the ADD button next to the word and they are added to your custom.dic

We also analyse the website to give you statistics like :

• Page with most suspect spellings
• Most frequent suspect words
• Pages with most words on them.

However, possibly the most powerful option is the Filter feature.

This allows you to create a Filter containing words and phrases that you want to locate on your website.

So:-

• if you were running a promotion that's now expired you can locate all references to it on your website so you can update or remove it.
• if key personnel changes have occurred you can filter on the name(s) and update or remove any references to them

There are a whole range of varying scenarios where this will prove very useful.

The report will identify the number of occurrences of each entry in the filter.  Clicking on an entry will take you to a list of pages where it occurs along with the line number in the code to make it even easier to locate.

Once you're happy that you've completed the update/removal you can update the Filter to remove that entry.

Further info on how to use the SpellChecker can be found at http://www.sitemorse.com/d/guides/Spellcheck_Guide.pdf