Christmas ahead

With Christmas now less than a month away, online shopping this year is set to break record levels.

If you haven’t already done so, check your site thoroughly for any problems before it’s too late – particularly if your site conducts secure online card transactions.

Check all internal links are okay, and test all email links and order forms to make sure they’re working properly. It is not enough to depend on customer complaints to flag up problems. How many are going to take the trouble of emailing you rather than move on to the next site in their list of results? A tiny fraction, it would be safe to guess.

A recent survey, admittedly by a web site testing company, claimed that 81 per cent of UK corporates relied on customer feedback as their main means of monitoring web site performance. Presumably the figure for small to micro-sized companies will be higher still.

To maximise your web site’s ability to generate business, a pre-Christmas check is money in the bank.

Here are three online tools that help test and troubleshoot a web site.

http://watson.addy.com/ - For the more advanced user who would know what to do with the results of the line-by-line forensics.

Web Site Link Checker - Quick way to check for broken links to and within graphics, other pages, other web sites and forms.

http://www.sitesolutions.com/webtest.asp - Testing includes page download times, an important factor in whether user’s stick around, and the CGI scripts that add functionality to pages.