Building a Web Site For Dummies®, 3rd Edition

Checking Those Links

Few things are more irritating than a bunch of broken links on a site. Visitors won’t mind the occasional click that takes them to a Page Not Found error — after all, the Web is a fast-changing place. But when broken links show up over and over again, visitors will decide that your site isn’t worth all the trouble you put them through.

So what can you do to minimize broken links? You can take all the care you want with your site’s internal links, but the links that lead to other people’s sites are out of your control. Sites go down, and pages and files change location, but the Webmasters in charge of those sites aren’t likely to keep you notified. If you have lots of links, keeping track of all those updated links can be a full-time job.

The real solution is to click every single link in your entire site on a regular basis. Fortunately, you don’t have to wear out your mousing finger doing this manually. This is the kind of thing that computers excel at. After all, one of their main purposes is to perform repetitive actions rapidly so that you don’t have to. Here are a few programs that can do the work for you.

2bone.com’s Link Checker

Link Checker by 2bone.com is a service that tests the links on any Web page, and it’s totally free. Really, no strings attached. No advertising commitments, no registration — you don’t even need to supply your e-mail address. How nice is that?

To check the links on a Web page, follow these steps:

1.	Go to www.2bone.com/links/linkchecker.shtml ...