Spelling is tricky stuff - just ask my nine-year-old son. And for anyone typing URLs the chance of misspelling even common words is uncommonly high.
So, if on your site you have a URL such as www.myserver.com/news/ it is pretty likely that people will occasionally enter wwww.myserver.com/nwes/ or www.myserver.com/new/ and, thud - they get an error message.
At this point some users will check the URL and correct it (which takes their attention away from your content ... sure that's only for a moment but anything that stops them from paying attention to you is lost opportunity). Some will try going to the root of your server (which is worse than the previous situation as they may not find the page they were looking for) or (worse) they may assume you have a problem and go elsewhere.
An interesting solution to the misspelling problem is a product called URLSpellCheck for IIS from Port80 Software.
URLSpellCheck for IIS is a URL redirector implemented as an ISAPI filter. According to Port80, the product "eliminates common URL spelling errors automatically and unobtrusively [and] can fix small typos such as missing characters, transposed characters, wrong characters, and extra characters. "
The company adds: "Complex matches that substitute file names such as filename.htm to filename.asp are also possible [and when] multiple matches for a URL are possible, a template showing users the various probably pages is provided rather than a standard 404 page. You can even map filenames without extensions to their correct pages allowing you to present very clean and easy to remember deep URLs in your marketing literature. URLSpellCheck can also track common typos so you can figure out where to add permanent redirects or change page names in your site. "
Check the product's home page for a collection of demos.
URLSpellCheck runs on IIS 4 under Windows NT, IIS 5 on Windows 2000 and IIS 5.1 on Windows XP.
Priced at an amazingly reasonable $119.95 for a single-server unlimited domains license, URLSpellCheck is a great idea and should be on every one of your IIS servers.
Now, we just need a similar product for other Web server platforms ...
RELATED LINKS
Mark Gibbs is a consultant, author, journalist, and columnist. He writes the weekly Backspin and Gearhead columns in Network World.
Mark Gibbs is a consultant, author, journalist, and columnist. He writes the weekly Backspin and Gearhead columns in Network World. Gibbs is also co-conspirator of the Vitally Important Information Web site.
Gibbs can be contacted at webapps@gibbs.com. Press releases to pr@gibbs.com.
