Larry Ferlazzo’s Websites of the Day…

If you’ve gone through the trouble of creating and maintaining a website or blog, you probably want to make sure that it’s working, and you might also want to monitor it to see if it’s reaching your intended audience.

I thought I’d put together a “The Best…” list that would provide some tools that do just that.

Of course, one key task you want to do is to back it up in case something goes wrong. You can find those tools at one of my previous lists –  The Best Ways To Back-Up Your Computer And Online Work.

Here are a few other applications that I’ve found helpful:

VERIFYING LINKS:

If you have a lot of links to other sites on your blog or website, it’s pretty de-energizing to students and others if lots of them are “dead” — no longer connecting to a site that exists.  I use two different free and automatic link verifiers.

One is the Any Browser Link Checker. It works easily and quickly to verify links on a page once you type-in the web address of the page you want it to check. Sometimes, though, it can’t handle a page if you have a ton of links on one, like I do on some of the pages on my website.

If you run into the same problem, then Dead Links is the tool to use. That always works, though sometimes you’ll get a fair number of “false negatives” — it’ll say a link is dead if it takes awhile to load when it really is still active.  You just have to double-check them.

BEING NOTIFIED IF YOUR BLOG OR WEBSITE IS DOWN:

Two free tools work well for monitoring your sites and then notifying you if they go down for some reason.

One is Observu and the other is Ding It’s Up. Observu will tell you when it’s down. Ding It’s Up will tell you when it’s down, but it also has the nice feature of letting you know when it’s up again, too. Are My Sites Up? is a similar service, as is Montastic.

KEEPING TRACK OF YOUR SITE STATISTICS:

There are obviously lots of different tools to keep track of your site’s statistics to see who is visiting your site, and how that compares with others. There are two in particular I like.

There’s the obvious one — Google Analytics. Sue Waters’ post on The Basics Of Using Google Analytics is the place to go to learn what all that data means.

Another tool you can use to obtain data about your site, and doesn’t require any installation of code onto your site, is called Dataopedia. A post at Read Write Web describes some of its useful features.

Also, check-out the Blog Grader for data.

CHECKING TO SEE WHAT YOUR READERS SEE:

One never knows what your blog posts look like in an RSS Reader or to email subscribers, or how your website or blog looks in different browsers….unless you check.

Read Sue Waters’ post on What Do Your Readers Really SEE? to get more suggestions on this topic, including information on a site which will give you screenshots of how your blog or website will look in a zillion different browsers.

OTHER USEFUL TOOLS

Website Grader will give you a lot of helpful information about your site. All you have to do is type in your address and it will immediately give you a report with recommendations on how to make it more accessible.

Spyder Mate, Examine URL and Link Voodoo will also provide you with free overall reports on your site with similar information.

These final tools don’t quite fit into this list, but they are related.

Copy Gator, Copyscape, Fair Share and Copyright Spot all are free and easy ways to monitor if your blog content is being copied by someone else who is then billing it as their own. Nik Peachey has written a good post about them.

As always, feedback is welcome.

If you found this post useful, you might want to look at previous “The Best…” lists and also consider subscribing to this blog for free.

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