To view the Report card.
But sometimes that's too late. Yes, learning about a broken link as soon as possible is better than not knowing about it at all, but that knowledge won't help those frustrated visitors who couldn't get through and went elsewhere. A good Web site management tool--or, more appropriately, a content analyzer--can eliminate problems by pointing out snags before a visitor ever finds them. By eliminating broken links and long downloads, you give the user a better experience and unimpeded opportunity to browse your site, which gives you a fighting chance to generate revenue.

At one of Network Computing's Real-World Labs® at the University of Wisconsin-Madison, we tested six leading content analyzers--Mercury Inter- active Corp.'s Astra SiteManager 1.01.1, Microsoft Corp.'s Microsoft Site Server 3.0, Tetranet Software's Linkbot Pro 3.6b, WebTrends Corp.'s WebTrends Enterprise Suite 2.1 and WindDance Networks' WebChallenger 98.3--on heavy-duty Web sites. We weren't satisfied with gathering everyday statistics; we wanted useful data that would give us direction on how to make our Web sites more effective. We expected to see rich reports detailing every aspect of the Web server, and we wanted the data to be presented in a meaningful way. For the most part, we were satisfied with the results, although we were not especially impressed.

Some of the products we tested are not solely content analyzers but are part of a much broader suite of Web site management tools. We tested Microsoft's Site Server in our recent log-analyzer review, and its content-analyzer component fit the requirements of this round of testing. To properly evaluate the field, we graded each product on its content-analysis features only.

WebTrends Corp. WebTrends Enterprise Suite 2.1
WebTrends Enterprise Suite is the most complete and refined tool we tested; its comprehensive scheduling options and robust features offered more depth than Site Server, Linkbot Pro, WebChallenger or Astra SiteManager. Enterprise Suite had little problem with our tests and test environment, and its reports include a wealth of valuable information including HTML syntax errors and suggestions about general site improvement. The ability to style reports to your liking and access back-end database information makes the results even richer.

WebTrends uses a profiles model to create site-analysis jobs that can be scheduled at a later time. These link profiles include link analysis, log-file analysis and proxy-log-file analysis. To start, we created a link-analysis profile. We were prompted to provide configuration information and choose how we wanted to proceed; each profile is created using a wizard in "express" or "advanced" mode. The advanced route requires detailed information about the link analysis, such as how deep to probe external links, file types (jpg, text or Java, for example) and URLs to filter from the end report. This last option saves you valuable time by skipping over user home pages that are more or less out of your administrative reach. Similar filters are available with all the other content analyzers we tested.