The most common types of errors & issues a web designer needs to check websites for are listed below:
BROKEN LINKS
These are probably the most common and most annoying errors users find in websites; they occur when a page on the same site or one it links to is removed or renamed. These errors can also occur for other reasons such as a site being taken down.
There are several methods you can use to check websites for broken links:
- Check each link by hand by clicking all of them. Only recommended for very small sites;
- Use the link checker provided by the World Wide Web Consortium (W3C);
- Use our tool for sites both online and on your hard drive.
Once broken links have been found they are usually easy to fix, you can either remove the link or change the address it points to.
SPELLING MISTAKES
This seems like something most website owners don't need but the issue can be more complicated than it first appears. Even if your using a tool such as DreamWeaver or FrontPage which does spell checking for you the following problems can still occur:
- Pages written by other individuals may not have been spell checked;
- Pages may not all use the same type of English (perhaps there's a mixture of UK/US English which can look unprofessional);
- Quick edits of the html without any tool can cause spelling mistakes because they weren't checked properly;
- On some sites users can submit content, this might not have been spell checked;
- Some sites use server side scripting and databases, the content which wasn't written directly into the html may not have been spell checked.
These various issues mean spelling can become a problem on many sites. The possible solutions include:
- Copy the content of every page into a word processor to check it;
- Use or software to check the spelling on every page of your site automatically.
INVALID (X)HTML
Html which has errors in it can lead to your site not displaying properly in one or more of the web browsers. Even if all the browsers display the content correctly valid html has the advantage of being more future proof (more likely to be compatible with future browsers) and it's commonly believed that valid html can help your search engine rankings.
You can check websites to make sure the html is correct by using several methods including:
- Using the World Wide Web Consortium (W3C) markup validator;
- Using DeepTrawl to either validate to stringent xhtml standards or by using the other types of check it performs to eliminate the most common types of individual mistakes from your html.
DeepTrawl is available for Windows & Mac OSX.
Why choose DeepTrawl?
Our product is designed to check websites for errors such as those above any many more. DeepTrawl is a single tool that makes the checking of a site much easier because all of the errors are presented in a single report.
DeepTrawl doesn't require you to check one page at a time. All you need to do is enter the address for the first page of the site and our software will check all of it automatically. This saves time and means you can check websites more regularly.
Once errors have been found DeepTrawl makes it very easy to fix them. You can see errors highlighted in your browser or in the integrated html editor, ready to be fixed.
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