Website Design Tips

Why this is Important

The biggest headache that a webmaster has is making sure that all links work - both internal and external. When a visitor to your site clicks a broken link, he will frequently assume the rest of the site is worthless and just go elsewhere.

How to Fix It

You don't have to test all your links yourself. NetMechanic will test all the links and images on your entire site and run while you are off-line besides! A couple of hours later, you will get an email message telling you where to find the report.

NetMechanic Report: Pages of your site that have broken links on them will have one or more red balls showing [instead of all green balls]. Click the "details" link to see the report on that particular page.

Broken links will be marked in RED. In most cases you can just ignore any links marked in ORANGE. And very few people mind if you have broken links in your guestbook.

NetMechanic Limitations: NetMechanic will only report the first 20 pages of the website. To cover an entire website, you can submit urls from inside the site. There will be a lot of overlap, but if you are careful you can cover the entire site this way. Pages that have a long load time don't always get all the links reported. And NetMechanic doesn't follow Javascript jumpbox links - just the regular HTML links.

NetMechanic Bugs: NetMechanic isn't 100% accurate - occasionally it will mark a link red when it really works fine. But this will show you which links you need to test yourself from your website. Occasionally NetMechanic will give you the url for a report on a different website altogether. NetMechanic is not allowed to test links to official Geocities pages, so you will have to test those by hand. Links to places that have automatic "jump to a different url" redirection are also marked as broken. Some common examples are: Starting Point, RASC, and Netscape.

You can also get help from WebsiteGarage and Dr. HTML.

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