How do you feel about errors? Are you the type who lies awake at night worrying that you might have omitted a comma in an email to your grandmother? No? Don't tell me you're one of those lazy slobs who just leaves things every which way! Whatever your personal tolerance for imperfection, errata on your Web site can cost you money.
April 6, 1999
Bad links, malfunctioning site features, and glacial page loads bug people big-time! They cost you page impressions, customers, and respect. Being careful when you create your pages is a good policy, but no matter what you do, errors will creep in, especially on a large site with several people working on it. It's well worth using a tool like Linkbot to find and fix errors on your site.
Linkbot Pro, from Tetranet Software, is a Website testing program that can automatically scan a site for more than fifty potential problems, including bad links, bad HTML, slow-loading pages and more. It's a link checker and HTML validator with sophisticated reporting and customization capabilities.
Getting cranked up with Linkbot is simple - Just enter the URL you want to check into the URL Field in the URL field on the toolbar. This can be a live site on the Web, or a page on your hard drive. Loaded up the old Web Developer's Journal, and guess what! Would you believe not a single error? I didn't think so. No my friends, I ended up spending hours with Linkbot, tracking down and fixing broken links and other errata. There's something addictive about it, actually - you may find yourself tweaking HTML code until far into the night.
Linkbot displays a list of all your links, with any problems noted. In fact, you can display them in any of several ways - you can see your entire site as a directory tree or as a URL tree, or you can look at each directory individually. Or you can display a list of broken links, pages with broken links, orphaned files, slow pages (you define what qualifies as "too slow"), pages missing titles, or pages missing ALT or HEIGHT and WIDTH tags.
Linkbot can also display a nice pretty report in your Web browser, just like a log analysis or ad reporting program. This is very handy for sharing information with others who may not have a copy of Linkbot up and running.
Errors are arranged into categories, and you can see statistics for each type of error, in various different views. You can browse the pages in question, or edit the HTML, all within Linkbot. It can even show how different types of errors have changed over time, so you can measure your progress towards an error-free site.
The link checking works great. Linkbot is smart enough to find links contained in Javascript or other scripts. You can customize the search to tell it not to bother with certain links, so if there's something you know it won't pick up, you just exclude that, run it again, and you're clean!
The link checking takes a while, especially if you have a large Web site. You can increase the speed by increasing the number of simultaneous connections (in the Options section). You can choose any number of connections you like, up to 30, so for maximum speed, crank it up to 30! You can save a "project" which includes all the parameters you've set, and the results from the last time Linkbot checked the site. You can have Linkbot recheck just selected directories, or redo the whole site after you've made corrections. You can even schedule it to check the site on a regular basis. So if you really wanted to be organized about this, you could have Linkbot run a check every Sunday night, and generate an HTML report to be sent to all the bosses Monday morning!
Linkbot uses the CSE HTML Validator, and a flexible tool it is. You can configure it just about any way imaginable, and it will check your HTML for compliance with whatever standards you desire.
I found Linkbot to be a well-designed and powerful program. Documentation is ample, and most commands are easy to figure out. It has the features and flexibility to be suitable for use on large commercial sites. I tested it on The Web Developer's Journal, which has 1260 pages, connecting through a cable modem. Checking the whole site took a while, but overall the program seemed stable and robust.
Wisebot
Wisebot was a rather unique tool that scans your site, and automatically creates a set of navigation tools for it. WiseBot has been discontinued, and is no longer available.
Metabot
Metabot, Tetranet's newest product, is a tool for managing metadata and automatically creating meta tags. It's just come on the market.
