A Tool for Untangling Your Website

A: As you've discovered, a corporate website can quickly grow in size and complexity. This presents the site's webmaster with lots of headaches, such as those associated with broken links, convoluted or congested paths, and dynamically generated pages.

There are some good programs on the market to deal with such problems. The one that we use here at Computing Japan is Astra SiteManager, from Mercury Interactive Corporation. Astra SiteManager (ASM) is a comprehensive, visual Web management tool that creates a site map, pinpoints broken links, and does a whole lot more besides.

ASM emulates a web browser by sending and receiving "cookies." To create a site map, it starts from a website's homepage (or any point you specify) and accesses all the links from that URL. ASM continues to do the same for each linked URL until all links on the website have been identified, tested, and displayed. (Even external links - those located on another server - can be included.)

The basic ASM map window consists of two panes. The upper pane, which shows a graphical, color-coded website map, allows you to zoom in on particular sections of the map. This visual map includes all Web objects: Common Gateway Interface (CGI) scripts, Java applets, HTML pages, and graphic files. Objects are shown in color (such as red for an unlinked page), and by positioning the cursor over an object you can see its full URL address.

You can select from three graphical views. The visual web display (a top-down, bird's eye view of the entire site) mirrors the complexity and inter-relatedness of a real-world website by representing it as interconnected "hubs and spokes." The incoming and outgoing link displays show, respectively, a hierarchical view of all links coming into or leading away from a selected URL.

The lower pane of the map window lists all the site's URLs with pertinent information, such as size, number of pages the URL is linked from, etc. You can select either a text view or a directory view.

You can save a snapshot file of each map and, with the "change viewer" function, compare snapshots to monitor how the architecture of your website has changed over time. You can even read your server's log file and superimpose usage patterns on the site map; this lets you quickly see which pages are getting the most "hits," so that you can improve your site's utility and effectiveness.

ASM includes several other useful management functions.

Link analyzer automatically identifies and displays any link-related problems.

Dynamic scan maps not only static links, but also dynamically generated pages that represent information contained in a database or obtained in real-time.

Link doctor uses the site's scanned map to detect and display all broken links and the pages that contain those links, and enables you to repair the links using your favorite HTML editor.

Action tracker facilitates optimization of your website by using numerical statistics and colored arrows to show the number of hits per URL or link, and how users navigate through your site. This information is helpful for improving content delivery and response time.

You can use these action tracker statistics with Astra SiteTest to automatically create load scenarios. Astra SiteTest is a "sister" product of Astra SiteManager that lets you stress-test your website from a single Windows workstation.

Developers will appreciate ASM's open API (application programming interface), which allows third-party software developers and users to easily and quickly develop useful Java, C++, or Visual Basic "plug-ins" (such as a server log analyzer or search engine). As your site grows, such plug-in modules will allow you to extend the functionality of Astra SiteManager to meet your particular needs. (Astra SiteTest, mentioned above, was actually built as a plug-in using Astra SiteManager's open API).

In short, Astra SiteManager is a valuable tool for managing a corporate website or your office intranet.