PCV Software - More Than Just Web Pages!

Check

Every web site has links to other web pages embedded in it. That is, in fact, pretty much what defines a page as a web page. Web pages are written using a computer language known as "HTML," which stands for HyperText Markup Language. "HyperText" refers to the links in a document that can be used to call up documents or other pages related to that text. For example, your home page will have links to the major sections of your site. If you have a site map page, it may contain links to every page on your site. As a service to your customers, or to supplement the information on your site, you may have links to other web sites, such as MapQuest, Google or Amazon.com.

However, over time, some of the pages to which these links refer may disappear, as your web site evolves to better reflect your company's changing market and business strategies. Yet, there is nothing more frustrating for an Internet user than to click on a link that portends to give them the answer they are seeking, only to get an error page from the server telling them that, no, that page no longer exists. While an effective error page may somewhat reduce their dissatisfaction, it is much better to periodically examine your site for these dead links and fix or remove them.

No, you don't have to sit for hours and click on every link on every page in your site and note the ones that have died. PCV Software offers the "ht://Check" program as a service to its customers. This program will automate the checking of all the links found on your site, and can be configured to provide even more valuable statistical information about your site for proper maintenance and review. Note: These reports are NOT run on your web server, but on our company's server. Ordinarily, then, these report pages would not be available on a web site. For purposes of this demonstration, we have made a copy of a previous version of the database (back when we had errors!) up to our web server and made the analysis programs available on the site. To access this demonstration, you'll be prompted for a user id and password. Enter "demo" for both (without the quotes).

Start at the ht://Check Summary Page - an overall summary of all aspects of the web site as discovered by ht://Check. Under "Available Operations," there are three additional analyses that can be performed:

Show the retrieved URLs list (with filter) - this allows you to search through the database of URLs that were found by the program, based upon things such as the status code, matching characters, content type, and size. This report provides a good tool for analysis not only of the web site links, but also the overall size of the pages, the type of content (images, document types, etc.) and other metrics.
Show the list of links retrieved - here's where you can do a systematic analysis of all the pages and links found on your site. In particular, under the "Result" category, you can list all of the broken links (in this case, there are 12 of them), JavaScript links, email links, etc. Under the "Link domain" category, you can list all your external links (those that go to sites other than your own).
List of retrieved and not retrieved URLs - the complete list of all the URLs found on your site, in the order in which they were found.

Note that not all the information appearing in the filter forms will return results. ht://Check can be configured to gather varying amounts of information as it crawls through the web site. The demonstration database was created using the default configuration in order to keep the amount of data small enough to allow it to be stored on our web server. In actual use, we would normally have ht://Check collect more data in order to provide you with an extensive set of metrics about your site