The bank's login screen asks for characters 3, 7, and 12 of your grid word. You've typed the word into a text field and you're counting with your finger on the screen. Character 12 is the second 'e'. Or is it the third? You count again.
Security grid authentication — where a financial institution stores a word and asks for specific character positions at login — is specifically designed to resist shoulder-surfing and keyloggers. Its weakness is that humans count through strings slowly and inaccurately under time pressure. WebWords was built to solve that specific problem.
The Automation That Makes the Grid Usable
The template uses a JavaScript script to split a grid word into twenty individual character fields: One, Two, Three through Twenty. Enter the grid word once in the Grid field, and the script populates each numbered character position automatically.
When the bank says "enter characters 3, 6, and 9," you look up Three, Six, Nine. No counting. No finger-tracking across a string. No errors at character 12 after you've already typed 11.
The script also validates: it checks word length against the twenty-field limit and handles empty string edge cases. A grid word that's only eight characters long populates Eight fields and leaves the rest blank — the blank field tells you immediately that the request for character 15 can't be satisfied by this particular word, which means either you've stored the wrong word or the bank is doing something unusual.
The Record Structure Around the Grid
Name identifies which institution or service the record covers. Website is the URL — a direct link that opens the login page without typing. Login and Password capture the standard credential layer that lives alongside the grid authentication.
For institutions that use grid authentication, it's typically a second factor layered on top of standard username/password. The record stores all three authentication elements in one place: the username/password for the first challenge, and the parsed grid word for the second.
Other Info is the free-text field for account numbers, security questions, customer service phone numbers, and any context that's needed for the full access picture but doesn't fit a structured field.
The twenty-field character split is the engineering investment that makes this template worth using over a plain text note. A text note stores "LIGHTHOUSE" and makes you count every time. The database stores L-I-G-H-T-H-O-U-S-E across ten named fields and hands you the specific character on demand, in half a second, with zero counting errors.