toolkit

Scenario · Content and search

There's a typo

“There's a spelling mistake on the about page.”

The smallest ticket on the desk is also the one most often half-finished: the specific typo somebody reported gets fixed, and the identical mistake three pages away — usually from the same template or copy-paste — does not. This finds every occurrence of the misspelling across the whole site before anyone edits a single page, while staying quiet on the practice's own brand names, procedure terms and house-style spelling choices that no dictionary would consider correct.

What to ask for

Spelling checkSite-wide spelling sweep — fetches a page (or every URL in a list), extracts the visible text, and flags suspected misspellings with a hunspell dictionary (nspell + dictionary-en).Site-wide content searchSite-wide content scout — searches every page of a site (or one page) for literal phrases or labelled regex rules and reports every occurrence with its surrounding sentence, so a copy change can be scoped before anything is edited.Before/after checkBefore/after verification for a change to a live page — the safety net for the small edit that doesn't justify a staging round-trip.

See it work

A real run of Spelling check:

REVIEW — 1 page(s) · 4 suspected misspelling(s)
      recieve ×1  → receive, relieve
      mesage ×1  → message, menage
      definately ×1  → definitely
      busness ×1  → business, busyness

  report: ./out/spelling-check-spelling-check.html
  text:   ./out/spelling-check-spelling-check.txt

The captured report, exactly as a run hands it to a client —open the full report ↗

The smallest ticket on the desk and the one most often half-done: the reported typo gets fixed, and the same typo three pages away does not. If it was worth an email, it is worth two more minutes.

  1. Fix what was reported, but find it everywhere first. Search the site for the misspelled string before editing anything. A misspelling that came from a template, a copy-paste, or a supplier’s product name is almost never on one page only.
  2. Run the spell check over the affected pages — or the whole site if the report suggests systemic sloppiness. Its verdict never hard-fails, because spelling always needs a human eye; treat the output as a list to read, not a list to apply.
  3. Confirm the intended spelling before changing it. Practice name, procedure names, brand terms and the practice’s house style for British versus American spelling. Correcting “aesthetic” to “esthetic” because a dictionary preferred it is a self-inflicted ticket.
  4. [manual] Fix every instance found in step 1, not just the reported one. In the CMS, page by page. If the string came from a template or a widget rather than page content, fix it at the source or it comes back on the next page built from it. Publish and purge.
  5. Verify. Re-run the search: zero hits for the misspelling. Before/after check on the pages touched, so a copy edit that broke a heading or a link shows up.
  6. Add genuine brand and clinical terms to the site’s allowlist. The ones the spell check flagged that are correct. That is what makes the next run of this useful instead of noisy — an allowlist nobody maintains produces a report nobody reads.

The allowlist is the compounding part

Every other step here fixes today’s typo. Step 6 is the one that makes the check trustworthy over time: a spell check on a medical site returns dozens of correct proper nouns on the first run, and either someone records them once or the tool gets ignored permanently.

What this does not cover

Deciding what is actually a mistake. A spell check flags suspected misspellings and deliberately errs toward silence on proper nouns, brand terms and medical vocabulary, so a real error in a drug name or a surgeon's name may not be flagged and a correct term may be. It also cannot tell you which spelling a practice has standardised on — British or American, hyphenated or not — which is the most common "typo" report that is not one.

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