Linkbot: Website maintenance

Review first published by WindoWatch.com

Maintaining the quality of your website

If you have a website composed of more than 50 HTML pages or have more than 4 authors on your website, you owe it to yourself to try this tool. Linkbot will help you ensure that your website works well for your visitors. It inspects your website for a number of common problems, then produces a report based on that analysis.

Features of Linkbot Pro

Linkbot scans a website by URL, local file system or by ftp. It follows all links on the pages to determine which links are not currently working correctly. It also can check Javascript and forms. It can report on broken links, old pages, slow pages, new pages and small pages. It can report on orphaned files, but only when it has scanned the local file system or by ftp. It then determines your website quality based on how many errors your site has.

The reports are simple to read and analyse, and easy to distribute the URL of the HTML file so colleagues can fix their parts of the website.

Installation of this product was a snap. I found it very straightforward to use as well, just type in a URL and away you go. In my case, I did have to ensure that the program knew information about a local proxy server so external links could be checked, but I could find where to set up the option quickly.

Features of Linkbot Enterprise

The enterprise version of linkbot is meant for use by large corporations. This program does all of the same functions as Linkbot Pro, plus it can:

• schedule new scans of your website,

• create a series of reports based on that scan according to your specifications. You may specify subdirectories in your website for each report, along with relevant problems.

• reports may have both an ASP and an HTML version published

• and send an email of the report to any email address you specify.

Each scheduled scan of one URL generates all the reports requested. Since this is all done automatically, you'll only need to check that the people involved use the report.

Linkbot Enterprise also understands and can submit forms, Flash and report on broken anchors including which files are trying to use that broken anchor (my most common broken anchor is "href=#top" where I've not actually create a name="top"). It also can report on all images missing height, width or alt information.

If your server is capable of using ASP, then you are also supposed to have some query tools specific for your site. Since I do not have an ASP capable server, I could not test these.

Other Watchfire Products

This company also produces Metabot, Wisebot, Watchbot, and Macrobot. Given how easy to install and use Linkbot was, the other products should be easy to use. I believe that all of the Watchfire products have trial versions, which makes them worthy of consideration. Of course, when you first trial Linkbot, you may be horrified by the problems in your site. This is one product that makes it easy to catch those silly mistakes or bad URLs or pages that are far too big.