With the release of URLSpellcheck 2.0 for IIS 6 (and 4/5) today, we thought we would cover URL typos and how domains can help as well.
You type URLs/URIs all day long, and it could certainly be a lot easier. For example, consider the simple move of not requiring www in an address, so amazon.com works just as well as www.amazon.com. However, there are a number of other possibilities to address possible typos and problems a user may encounter when typing a URL including:
The first couple of these changes, in the cases of the w's, are free -- if you can add DNS records to your Web server, you can do these right away. You might even get carried away and have eee.google.com work (look at your keyboard, and you can guess why).
Now, the contingency domain fixes will require you to buy a domain or two, but, with prices well below $10 a year, it seems a small price to pay. We have found this to be quite valuable and try to have domains for all our products so httpzip.com and the like works just as well. You will notice that many other companies do this now -- for example, www.ipod.com works just fine.
Cheers,
Port80
P.S. If you do all this and then you might have some typos in your path or file name, URLSpellCheck can handle that on IIS Web servers. And don't get all excited about some belief of a penalty of doing URLSpellChecking: it doesn't get invoked until a 404 error occurs so, at that point, a millisecond level delay with a redirection to the proper resource (or multiple matches presented to the user for that resource) is better than a turbo-fast error page anyways... For the LAMPs out there, try mod_speling on Apache!