Send Your Website Back To School

The school buses are revving and kids are heading back to school with books in their backpacks and pencils in their pockets. They'll be taught and tested, and hopefully at the end of the year they'll turn out a little bit better than when they started in the fall.

What if you sent your website back to school along with your kids? A few simple tests can help you determine where your website is falling behind and what you can do to get it back on the right track.

• Test for broken links. Broken links are the bane of every webmaster. There are several free link-checkers available online; try this one provided by the W3 Consortium.



• Set up Google Analytics for your website. Google Analytics is like a report card for your website. Setting it up is usually quick, easy, and can give you information you never knew existed regarding how your website performs. Contact Carrie at cdowning@arcstone.com to get your website hooked up with Google Analytics.



• Use Google Webmaster Tools. Apart from analytics, Google offers a suite of tools that will allow you to see crawler stats, perform website diagnostics, create a sitemap for your entire site, and will let you create enhanced 404 pages (just to name a few).



• Spell check your text. Sounds like a no-brainer, right? But as your site changes and evolves, chances are you've misspelled something somewhere.



• Pay the tuition. Nothing is worse than forgetting to renew your domain and suddenly your website is no longer available. Make sure you know who manages your domain, who hosts your website, and who supports your email. Once you know that info, make sure your bills get paid.



• Clean out the locker. If your server is clogged with unnecessary files, it can bog down your site and even lead to confusion for your visitors. If you have a page that you no longer link to from your website, but haven't deleted from your server, it could still turn up in search engine results.

« back to top

Search Giant Enters the Browser Race

The ubiquitous Google's most recent bid for a piece of the market pie is the newly launched beta browser, Chrome. If you're wondering how this will affect you or your website, you won't have to search too hard. The Internet is already a-twitter. Here's a breakdown of some of the reviews and commentary, both positive and negative.

• Beta is beta – but will the glitches prevent people from using Chrome? Check out the review on Information Week for a rundown of some of the bugs. Alternately, you can go to Google's own page for reporting known bugs.



• Does Chrome threaten to take a significant chunk of the market away from other browsers? It may be too early to tell if Chrome will steal users away from Internet Explorer and Firefox, but it has already overtaken the original tabbed browser, Opera. Read more about it here.



• How does it compare? Read MSNBC's comparison of Internet Explorer 8 vs. Chrome. You can also check out an article over at Internet News which argues Chrome may actually be good for Firefox.



• Reviews, reviews, reviews. PC World has distilled 7 points for and against Chrome, detailed here. Computer World praises Chrome's simple, fast performance here. And you can keep tabs on all new Chrome news at (where else?) Google News.

You can download and test Chrome yourself from the Google website here. Have fun!

« back to top

• Send Your Website Back To School
• Search Giant Enters The Browser Race