My web site is a Ferrari (websitegarage.com)

Member Name: robinlawrie

Product:	websitegarage.com
Date:	09/10/01 (161 review reads)
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You have designed and published your website and are rightly proud of your efforts. Now all you need is to let the rest of the world know all about it and bring them flocking to your door. When it appears not to be happening as you planned, what do you do? Let me put it another way, think of your website as a car. If it was not performing as you would wish, would you fiddle with it yourself? Or take it to a qualified mechanic at a garage?

If you are a “fiddler”, off you go, and I wish you well. If however you would prefer a qualified and competent mechanic to look at it, completely free of charge, then read on. Your site needs looking at by a mechanic, an MOT if you like and I know just the place to go.

www.websitegarage.netscape.com. Let the experts have a look at your pride and joy and give you some advice on how it can be improved.

When you arrive at the site it is possible to have their “mechanics” take a quick look at one page and give their verdict. It is however much better if you sign up as a member (free) and allow them to give your pride and joy a real going over. They pull no punches and some things they tell you, may not be appreciated by you, especially if you have slaved for days trying to get it just as you want it.

Once you are logged in, you are asked for the URL of your site. Once entered it takes less than a minute for Web Garage to check your site, have a 6-page report ready and just to be on the safe side, have mailed the whole thing to your email address ensuring you have a copy of it all.

First of all it will give you a diagnosis of the site, which will be: Excellent, Good, Fair or Poor. This is something akin to doo-yoo but with an honest rating system. It then moves on to explain why it has rated your site thus:

•Browser Compatibility Fair
•Register-It Readiness Good
•Load Time Good
&
#8226;Dead Links Excellent
•Link Popularity Good
•Spelling Excellent
•HTML Design Good

Each of these is a clickable link, which will take you to the relevant page that will explain how you can correct the various mistakes.

“Browser compatibility” explains which of the various browsers; IE Netscape etc are having problems (if any) with your site and how to correct them. In practice it is generally the earlier versions of browsers that should give you any problems, and only then if you have ventured into Flash or Java based programmes.

“Register it readiness” is important as it checks whether your web page is set up to be indexed correctly by search engines. In practice this means that if you have not inserted “Meta Tags”, now is the time to do it, don’t worry if you don’t have a clue about Meta tags as webgarage can provide you not only with the suggested tags but where in your HTML you need to insert them. It will also check the top 8 or so search engines to see if you have registered with them, and if not, offer to do it for you.

“Load Time” checks the time that various speed modems take to load your site, and gives the connect rate in seconds from 14.4k to ISDN and T1. As a general rule it checks the size of any gifs or jpeg’s and advises if their size could be optimised. It also offers to do the job for you.

“ Dead Links” checks that all your links are working correctly and if not which and where they are situated on the site.

“Link Popularity” tells you how many sites, and who the sites are that have links to you from around the Internet.

“Spelling” A spelling check on your site. Not applicable to doo-yoo writers.

“HTML Design” c
hecks just how accurate your HTML design code actually is. In practice you will find that it is nitpicking unless your coding is complete garbage.

As if all this is not enough, it is possible to have inserted a “hitometer” onto your site that will monitor not only the number of hits, but allow you to understand and analyse your site traffic.

It will offer to keep a record of your details, allowing you to make periodical checks (not unlike your car being serviced) on the state of your website.

This site will not sort out all of your problems, nor is it all that you need to succeed in the WWW. But as a web tool, it is an excellent and valuable resource.

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