Think Twice about typographical errors

Some of you may recognize this as a homepage ad from the main landing page of the Towson University website. I work in the University Relations department at TU, and one of the things I do is make homepage ad banners like this one. I happened to make this one. And it got past me, my boss, other web people, and made it onto the website... with this very obvious (at least now that it has been pointed out to me) typographical error in it! I went to take a screenshot of it on the website, but thankfully it had already been taken down when I went to do it.

Another one of my job duties is to manage the website feedback that comes in through the comment form. I forward it to whoever it is supposed to go to or respond if I can, or fix it if I have access. Well, this came in as a feedback submission, and thankfully, too. Otherwise this spelling error would have stayed on the website for another week... and having a spelling error on the website of an institution of higher education is NEVER a good thing. I read through department websites sometimes and find them rife with errors, and it really aggravates me! How hard is it to do a simple spell check? It takes an extra minute before you publish the page.

At TU I use Contribute to edit webpages, and I ALWAYS hit the spell check on every page before publishing, even if I know I was the last person to edit it, and already did a spell check. Unfortunately, I have to say when working on things at home in Dreamweaver, I have a tendency to forget about doing a spell check, and have gone and looked at my pages after uploading and found errors. Browsers and Word and TextEdit with their automatic spell checks and underlining in red have spoiled me so.

So lesson learned: always double, triple, quadruple check the way you spell things when making graphics with text in Photoshop. Hey, maybe even just paste the word in from a spell checked capable application. That could never hurt (and I have totally done that before, too).